Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Global Communication Law

Global Communication Law
- A global approach to the implementation of international law and policy administered by an agency such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) was reserved for areas such as broadcasting.
- A global approach has also been embraced when mutual cooperation furthered social goals such as the protection of intellectual property rights.

The traditional role of freedom of expression

Conditions accompanying freedom

- Emerson saw freedom of expression in a modern democratic society as a set of rights. Among these were the right of citizens to think and believe whatever they wanted and the right to communicate those thoughts and beliefs in any medium.
- These freedoms will be extended not only to political discourse but also to the infinite range of artistic, scientific, religious and philosophical inquiries that capture and cajole the human imagination.
- Four resultant conditions that are essential to a true democracy and that are present in a society only when freedom of expression is present: human dignity and self fulfillment, progression toward truth through an unfettered “marketplace of ideas,” the provision of the instrument, or means of democratic decision making and conflict can take place without any necessary resource to violence.

International and national limitations on freedom of expression

The United States

- Although freedom of expression is a foundational value in a modern democracy, other societal values at specific times and in specific circumstances are equally important or of great importance to democratic nation-states.
- No nation-state is willing to allow highly classified national security materials to be passed without penalty to an enemy, nor to allow a conspiracy to murder a group of innocent citizens.
- Modern democracies differ as to both the critical societal values that must be balanced against freedom of expression and the formulas that are to be used in the balancing process.
- Punishment for expression that causes real injuries usually occurs in the United States after the expression has taken place.
- The United States allows much expression that is punished or banned in some modern democracies.
- Expression that engenders emotional distress or disgust; expression that causes embarrassment; expression that might be perceived as insulting, blasphemous, sexist, racist, vulgar or indecent-all are protected and tolerated as free speech in American society.

International covenants

- The right of free speech stands as a general norm of customary international law.
- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

National Limitations

- Democratic nation-states diverge in significant ways in their respective limitations on freedom of expression.
- Groups and individuals who openly engage in speech disparaging people of particular races, creeds or colors can do so freely.
- The laissez-faire attitude of the United States in the areas of hate expression can be contrasted with that of Great Britain, Canada, India and Nigeria, for example.
- Similar divergences by democratic nation-states in assigning the parameters of freedom of expression are readily apparent in areas such as prior restraint and censorship for national security purposes.
- There could have been no damage award, because any civil privacy concerns would have been outweighed by the fact that the matter was of public concerns.
- The areas of censorship for national security purposes and censorship for moral and religious reasons are especially worthy of further examination.

Censorship and national security

The U.S. situation

- As mentioned previously, the general concept of censorship –that is, the concept of the government’s taking overt action to prevent its people from having access to particular facts, ideals, and opinions- is constitutionally repugnant in the United States.
- In the United States, most recent charges of governmental censorship in the national security arena have centered on the treatment of the press during military operations.
- A 1977 agreement between representatives of the press and the government was mutually accepted as balancing national security needs with the duty of the press to inform American citizens.
- During the war in Iraq, however, U.S. and British forces placed restrictive regulations on the media through an interim media counsel.
- The culture of a “right to information” has permeated American society since the original adoption of the FOIA in 1966.

The world situation

- Great Britain provides a good example of a country that does not hesitate to curtail expression for what it claims are national security reasons.
- In 2000, Britain incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into its own domestic law, providing Britons with at least the opportunity to have a right of freedom of expression of expression that can be enforced in the British courts.
- The British government has blocked publication of information in Britain that had already been published in other countries.
- Germany provides another example of a democratic society that does not hesitate to censor in the same of national security. The German constitutional system, or Basic Law, establishes numerous individual rights, including the right to free speech.
- Some forms of political speech are viewed as dangerous expression that potentially could do great harm to the internal security of the nation.
- Britain, Germany, Japan, Ireland and France represent relatively long-established democracies. If similar scrutiny were applied to more recently emerged democracies in various parts of the world, the tendency of nations to censor for perceived national security reasons would become even more apparent.

Censorship for moral and religious reasons

American censorship

- The American position with regard to obscenity is somewhat at odds with its general posture as the world’s leading defender of freedom of expression.
- No definition of obscenity could command a majority of the Court during the 1960s and early 1970s.
- At the federal level, under political pressure after almost a decade of little enforcement activity the Justice Department began an aggressive program of obscenity prosecutions.
Moral-religious censorship around the world
- The American predilection to single out obscenity as an area of expression is not

necessarily shared around the globe.

- In Germany, for example, obscenity is not “as central as policy concern”
- England takes a more permissive legal stance on obscenity than the United States, defining obscenity according to the type of person who may obtain the material.
- The law is primarily aimed at the protection of children, and graphic sexual materials that are restricted to the adult population are not necessarily considered obscene.
- Sweden and Holland have virtually no laws restricting obscenity, and both of these countries have large pornography industries.
- However, some countries, like Ireland, engage in even more intense censorship of obscenity than the U.S.
- A global look at the reaction of nation-states to pornographic and obscene materials thus reveals the same divergences in policy and law that affect all other areas of expression.
- In Saudi Arabia and Iran concepts like individualism, liberty, democracy, free markets, and the separation of church and state are out of place in an Islamic civilization.
- In Islam, the claim to a unique and valid alternative position on human rights, can give rise to censorship activities that seem quite foreign from a Western democratic perspective.
- What is obvious from the foregoing example is that some nation-states deny the universality of the Western democratic conception of human rights and the subsequent importance of freedom of expression.
- On a global scale of freedom of expression ranging from total censorship to absolute freedom, nation-states can be found that occupy almost all available positions.

Existing international regulatory bodies

International Telecommunication Union

- The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) was formed in 1932, growing out of the International Telegraph Union.
- In 1947, the ITU became a specialized agency of the United Nations.
- In various forms, it has played a dominant role in international cooperation and standard setting throughout the history of telecommunications.
- It now functions as the ultimate manager of the world’s telecommunications resources.
- The ITU has its own convention, constitution, and operating regulations, all of which have the status of international treaties.
- Two major criticisms currently threaten the continued dominance of the ITU in its role as global overseer of telecommunications: voting power and financial contributions.
- Yet another problem facing the ITU is the growing importance of nonstate actors, primarily large commercial telecommunication firms, on the world telecommunications scene.

Intelsat

- The International Telecommunication Satellite Organization (Intelsat) was established by the United States and various European countries in 1964.
- Initially, like the ITU, Intelsat was primarily an organization directed by its member nation-states, although state-designated telecommunications entities also were part of a multilevel governance scheme.
- After nearly 40 years as a treaty-based organization, Intelsat went private in 2001.
- The move to privatize was driven by the need to be competitive in a global communication environment.
- It also operates an integrated group of telecommunications companies.

1 comment:

Gitanjali said...

well written.
thank u
helped me for my PG exams!
:) :) :) :)