ACCESS TO INFORMATION AS A HUMAN RIGHT
Rahul Mishra:-BBA LLB.
4 th Semester: KIIT LAW SCHOOL
uman rights have been characterized as rights to those Resources and circumstances necessary for living a minimally good life1. Information rights include rights to create and communicate information (e.g., freedom of expression, freedom of association), to control others' access to information (e.g., privacy and intellectual property), and rights to access information (e.g., freedom of thought, the right to read). Some information rights have been recognized as human rights in international instruments (e.g., Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Declaration on the Rights of the Child, Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights lists a number of rights related to information access and control (see [2] Articles 18, 19, 25, and 26). Philosophers and educational theorists have argued that persons have some rights related to information access, e.g., the right of freedom of thought and expression (e.g., [3], [4], [5]) and the right to an education (e.g., [6], [7], [8], [9]). However, such rights have not been conceptualized as founded in a more basic human right to information. This will focus on those rights related to free access to information and argues that access to information is indeed a fundamental human right. It is further argued that the right to access is not merely a liberty right, but also a welfare right. That is, individuals' information rights place duties on governments to provide access to information. The main line of argument will display. I argue that access to information is indeed necessary in order to live a “minimally good life” in at least three ways. First, human beings are creatures with a capacity and a desire for knowledge. As Aristotle wrote in the Metaphysics , “All human beings by nature desire to know.” A life deprived of adequate access to information and knowledge is a seriously impoverished life. Second, knowledge is not only good in itself; it is pragmatically essential that persons have access to information if they are to have the capacity to exercise their other rights. In this sense, knowledge is what J. Rawls2 called a “primary good,” that is, it is a good that is useful to anyone, whatever his or her plan of life or conception of the good. Third, in order for persons to effectively exercise and protect their other rights, they need access to information. I conclude this by arguing that free public libraries are an essential public institution necessary for ensuring that citizens have adequate access to information. As if will appeal to those rights listed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other United Nations and International rights documents, this is a work in moral theory. It is not an exercise in explicating what follows from the U.N. declarations or international law. Rather one would argue for a particular understanding of the underpinning values promoted by the rights listed in these documents. And in doing so, I may argue that our human rights extend beyond what has been explicitly encoded in human rights document. Human rights have been defined as the rights that protect our interests in having “those resources and circumstances necessary for living a minimally good life”3 . These rights are those we have simply in virtue of being human, and are not tied to membership in any particular political society or state. Such rights may be liberty rights—what are often termed in the international law literature “political rights”—or welfare rights—what are often labeled in the international law literature “socio-economic rights.” In what follows, I will rely on this basic definition of a human right. There are a number of different accounts of the moral basis of these rights, but we need not enter into those debates here. I will, however, be taking the view according to which rights are seen as protecting our “interests.” By interests I do not merely mean something we find “interesting,” but our fundamental needs and goals as human beings4 . On this view a “minimally good life” is one wherein we have a meaningful capacity to satisfy (or have satisfied) our fundamental interests as human beings. There are some further points worth making about the obligations that human rights impose on others. Human rights are typically understood as those rights that states must respect. Typically, whether an action violates a human right depends on whether there was a state actor involved. A state may infringe a human right either by directly doing something that violates a right—e.g., by failing to provide basic education for children or by suppressing unpopular speech—or it may do so by failing to provide a legal structure necessary to prevent systematic abuses. So, for example, if a state fails to have any laws forbidding child labor, then it is guilty of a human rights violation. While many theories claim that the obligations required by respecting human rights only apply to governments, it seems perfectly natural to say that individual persons can also engage in human rights violations. It would be odd to say that a state is violating human rights by allowing a corporation to employ child labor, but that the corporation is not violating human rights when it (legally) employs children. In my view, individuals or non-government groups may violate human rights as well as governments. However, when persons have welfare rights these primarily place obligations on society as a whole, and thus on the entities which regulate society and have the power to distribute and redistribute income and other goods—e.g., governments .
ACCESS TO INFORMATION AS A HUMAN RIGHT
In this section, I argue that access to information is indeed a resource necessary for living a minimally good life. It should be noted, that, while I do not discuss the issue of information quality here, it is clear that in arguing that people have a right to access information, I mean that they have a right to access quality information (just as a right to food implies a right to sufficiently nutritious food). There are several dimensions of information quality, including accuracy, completeness, currency, and comprehensibility5 . The inclusion of comprehensibility points to a further feature of information. Some document or other communicative format is “informative” to a person only to the extent that she is able to comprehend the information contained in the document. Thus, fulfilling the right to access information will often require that we consider in what format the information will be most comprehensible to the people who need it. In addition, the right to information will often require that resources be devoted to giving people the needed skills to comprehend information, e.g., through efforts to increase literacy. A moment's reflection makes clear how useless many of our rights are if we are not given access to crucial information. In an article entitled “The Right to Information as a Leverage Right,” argues that, given that rights are interdependent, in order to be able to exercise our rights more generally, people must be given access to information.6 Courts have found, for example, that people have a right to information about environmental hazards and other potential threats to safety. It has been argued that rights to information extend to information related to reproductive health and choice .7 These are just a couple of examples of the types of information to which we may argue persons have a right to if they are to exercise their other human rights. Below I discuss some of the most crucial ways in which information provides the necessary precondition for our ability to exercise our other rights. First, we need to be given access to information regarding what rights are. If we are not aware of what our rights are, or that we even have rights, then we cannot be our own or others' advocates in exercising those rights. For instance, any are familiar with the Miranda warning made famous by American cop shows. This warning explicitly tells the suspect what his or her rights are. The reasoning behind this warning is that, absent such information about their rights, a defendant cannot take an appropriate role in the exercise of those rights8 . With regard to public information, it has been argued that that, “The right to access public information about one's economic, social and cultural rights is not only related to these rights – it is a precondition for their realization. Without information about the scope and content of their rights to health, housing or work, citizens are unable to determine whether their rights are being respected. International law recognizes this connection” ([17], 18). Indeed, recognizing the importance of this in the preamble to the UDHR, the UN declared, “That every individual and every organ of society, keeping this declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these right and freedoms.”Second, once we know what our rights are we may need further information to know whether rights are being respected and how to press for their fulfillment. In some cases, it may be obvious that the government is failing to respect my rights. In many other cases, however, it may not be as clear. As the human rights organization Article 199 points out, “to evaluate the extent to which the right to education is realized, it is necessary to have access to literacy rates, enrollment rates, commuting times, dropout rates, and budgets, not only in the aggregate but disaggregated by gender, social class, geographic centers (urban, rural), religion and ethnicity.” It is particularly important in this context that governments and others who have crucial information with regard to actions that may violate rights have an obligation to provide citizens with this information10 . Puts it succinctly when she notes that, “The right of access to information ensures that action which may violate one or other of the fundamental rights is not concealed under the guise of secrecy.” Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, we need access to information on a broad range of topics in order to have the capacity to exercise a plethora of our other human rights. For example, if one is denied access to information about how to apply for jobs, for benefits, how to access and use health care, then, for all intents and purposes, one is being denied the rights to such things. If one does not have at least basic information about who is running in an election, their positions, their past experience and actions, then the rights listed in Article 21 of the UDHR11 , “Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives” are meaningless. One cannot express one's will in elections, if one does not have the information necessary to make one's choices a genuine expression of one's values and preferences.
I have argued that we must to move beyond the conception of intellectual rights as mere liberty rights, which can be protected by the government letting individuals alone. Given the pivotal role of access to information in the exercise of all other human rights, the right to information should be understood as a welfare right that places on governments (and perhaps others) the duty to provide people with information .
Books Referred
• Rawls, J. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Oxford : Oxford University Press.
• Fox, C., Levitin, A., & Redman, T. 1994. The notion of data and its quality dimensions. Information Processing and Management.
Websites Referred
• Nickel, J. 2007. Human rights. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. E. N. Zalta, (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2007/entries/rights-human/>.
• Access to Information: An Instrumental Right for Empowerment. <http//www.article19.org>
• United Nations. 1948. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. URL <http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html>
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