Communication and Human Rights

Communication and Human Rights offers a conceptual scheme for understanding the dynamic interrelationship between communication and human rights. Claims that communication is a basic right, available-for-all, and taken-for-granted by all human beings, as stated in various declarations, incites heated debates and controversies in practice, including hate speech, propaganda, and even claims for publishing criminal diaries and pornography. This book examines the nature and context of these divisive declarations and provides a provisional conceptualization of the concept ""right"". To unpack these debates, this novel book delves into the position of various thinkers, scholars and intellectuals: from Milton, Locke, and Voltaire to Dewey, Habermas, and Schiller; concluding that a possible Right to Communicate would build on a notion of Habermasian validity, where this right is related to a specific type of communication-right-based communication-that is characterized by pureness, truth, and sincerity as well as the existence of a relative relationship between a claim of a right to send and the responsibility toward receivers.