Seminar on International Women's Human Rights
May 17, 2006, Miriam College, Quezon City
I am very delighted that I am invited to do this presentation precisely on the World Information Society Day. Has anyone here heard of the World Information Society Day? Did you know that it is on this day? No wonder if you don't, since it is the first time this day is celebrated. Does anyone know how this came about?
Just as there is the Human Rights Day on December 10, the World Aids Day on December 1, the Day Against Racism on March 21 and, of course, the International Women's Day on March 8, the United Nations (UN) declared May 17 as the World Information Society Day last year at the World Summit on the Information Society.
Why is this day of relevance to the topic today?
Well, I was asked to talk about “Applying Human Rights (HR) Standards in Different Cultural Contexts.” And as Isis International-Manila is a women's organisation that works in the field of communication and access to information, I would like to focus on Applying HR Standards in the so-called Information Society.
But first, I would like to look at the Universal Declaration of HR and cultural diversity.
The Universal Declaration of HR was drafted 58 years ago right after World War II. I am sure you already discussed this. Its intentions were and still are good and it still is a very important document. But if we look at it today over 50 years later, we can read the impact of the aftermath of the Second World War in Europe in the document. It focuses very much on the right of the individual vis-a-vis the state and his or her legal rights (about 17 out of 30 articles).
But does the document reflect the needs of all people worldwide? How about people who live in a very strong community setting, where the community is more important than the state? As in the case, for example of certain indigenous peoples in the Philippines or in many other countries in Asia and the Pacific? The Declaration of HR does not protect communities from losing their ancestral land or their rights
over the water supply or intellectual property rights over their plants and their indigenous herbal medicine.
The declaration likewise does not protect the rights of the individual within the community. This is specially true for women. Very often, the life of women is very narrowly determined by religious, traditional and cultural values of the community. Thus it is very hard for women to insist on their rights according to the Universal Declaration of HR as it does not reflect their situation.
In a globalised economy with huge differences between rich and poor within a nation state, and especially between different nations, the declaration of HR does not protect individuals and people from economic injustice and exploitation. In the words of Noam Chomsky, a US intellectual, “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is about Freedom, Justice and Human Dignity in a world of huge inequality and huge concentration of power.”
This inequality and power concentration, which has great impact on the poor majority in a globalised economy, is not addressed by the HR Declaration.
The Human Rights Declaration was never intended to address fair distribution of wealth and power. The institutional framework of drawing a new world order after World War Two was based on three pillars:
- The political order was defined by the UN Charter,
- The relation of the state towards its Citizens was defined by Universal Declaration of HR, and
- The international economic order was defined by the so called Bretton-Woods-System: The World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organisation, etc.
These were drafted in a way that they mainly serve the economic interests of the United States and Britain.
I believe we have to see the Universal Declaration of HR in this framework. If we go back to our theme today, “Human Rights Standards and Different Cultural Contexts,” it becomes very clear that the third pillar, the economic order imposed by the Bretton Woods Institutions does not address different cultural contexts.
Having said this, we can go back to the World Information Society Day. The day came out of the World Summit on the Information Society process that was held in Geneva in 2003 and in Tunis in 2005. The objective of the summit was to regulate the rapidly developing information technology sector so that it would serve the society.
Many women's organisations and other cause-oriented groups participated in the WSIS process and tried to influence its outcome. Our objective was to put human rights and development at the center of the Information Society. We said that the new and old communication technologies should serve the people, the oppressed and marginalised, and should be used to redress inequality.
It was a very hard battle. The commercial world, such as the mainstream media, the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) industry, and many governments were not at all interested in shaping the Information Society that way.
To Isis-Manila, it became clear that Article 19 in the HR declaration does not fully promote people's right to communication, which is a two-way process. Article 19 reads: “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.”
Freedom of speech protects your public opinion. But what if you have no way of making your opinion public? Because the mainstream media is not interested in what you have to say, because you are a grassroots woman for instance. So article 19 of the Universal Declaration of HR does not guarantee access to the media and to information technologies.
An Information Society that wants to address the development needs of the poor and the marginalised, of women in the communities, needs to give voice to precisely these groups of people. For, how else could they say what is their needs in terms of implementing HR Standards in their cultural context?
And here we come to the second part of the title of today's course, “Tensions and Dilemmas.”
ICTs bring great advantages in terms of communication. It makes information gathering, networking, and communication with your beloved ones so much easier. That is certainly true, but only for the so-called information rich, those who have access to Internet, to TV, to telephone, etc. How about the so-called information poor who might not even have electricity in their village? And yet they are the majority in the world's population. Women are even more deprived of access to information than men because for the most part of the world, the illiteracy rate among women is higher than among men.
This gap between the information poor and the information rich is called the digital divide. So one of the dilemmas in implementing the right to communication is the digital divide. While some get more information, some become even more deprived of information because of ICTs.
Many publications that were disseminated in print before are now being disseminated through email or via websites. How about those who regularly read these newsletters in a library or a community center and do not have access to the Internet?
Isis works towards the full implementation of the right to communication of every women and men. Everyone should have access to the Internet, to all forms of media, and other medium of communication. This will obviously take time to achieve, so it is our vision for the future. At the same time, we work towards bridging the so-called digital divide through alternative media.
One important tool is community media, particularly community radio. Community radio is located in the community and serves the community. It is produced and operated by the women, men and children of the community. It is an alternative to the commercial radio stations, such as 101.1 FM in Manila and the government radio station Radyo ng Bayan.
It is a radio station where the people themselves decide what they want to talk about. In many different places around the world, we have experienced that it is a very effective tool for women's empowerment. This is because:
- Radio is still the media that is most used, specially by the poor people and in rural areas.
- It also reaches illiterates and people who do not speak English or other Internet languages.
- Women can listen to the radio while they are working at home.
- Women can have their own programs on the community radio station and inform each other about women's rights according to the Universal Declaration of HR, and other international and national women's human rights tools such as the Beijing Platform for Action, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), and others.
- Being informed, women can better talk about their needs in the community on the radio. We all know information means power!
- Having a public voice on the radio gives women more credibility and respect within the family and the community.
Community radio is also a very effective tool for bridging the digital divide by translating relevant information from the World Wide Web through the radio to the listeners at the grassroots.
Unfortunately, not everyone is as convinced as Isis on the effectiveness of community radio. The commercial radio stations see these as a competition and most states either do not see the need for them or fear that they would not be able to control them.
The result is in most countries, including the Philippines, there are no broadcasting laws that are friendly to the establishment and sustainability of community radio. This is one of the big tensions we encounter in implementing the right to communication.
Community radio is just one alternative media Isis engages in to empower women. I would be happy to go into these other forms during the question and answer part of the forum.
Thank you very much for your attention.
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Isis Resource Center holds one of the largest feminist collections of materials in the Global South. With 40 years of publication experience, Isis holds a vast collection.