The right to communicate

The right of adults to communicate privately with any other adults on any subject is one of the ^[1]four fundamental and inalienable human rights^[2]. 

What is the scope of this right?  Why is it limited to adults?  Why is it qualified with "privately"? 

The right to communicate freely on any subject implies freedom of information.  It also implies absence of increasingly futile external censorship^[3].

Communication is a voluntary act; a voluntary exchange of information between two or more individuals.  The initiator seeks a response, perhaps the provision of information, perhaps the performance of some other action; the recipient of the initiating message has the option of not responding; communication occurs when the circle is closed and the recipient responds, though not necessarily in the way anticipated by the initiator.  Persistence by a jilted initiator ceases to be an attempt at communication; it becomes harassment of an unwilling audience. 

Have you ever had to share a commuter train carriage with a religious zealot who pulls out his Bible as soon as the train leaves the station to harangue the sleepy early-morning travellers with loud admonitions and threats of eternal damnation?  As far as the zealot is concerned he is exercising his right to freely express his faith in public, and, besides, he is doing his duty to Jesus in seeking to convert the wicked and the wayward. 

To the commuters his proselytising is an affront, and an infringement of their right to travel to work in peace.  The commuters are a captive audience to the zealot.  They cannot escape his uninvited attention.  They have not given their consent to his performance, and their consent was reasonably required because, while it was arguably a public place, a moving train carriage does not give any commuter the choice to stand up and walk away.  A train carriage, unlike a church, is also not customarily a public place that people would enter in the reasonable expectation of being assailed by a preacher.  The same holds true for an electioneering politician, or a used-car salesman. 

The zealot would certainly have had the right to impart his message in private^[4] to a willing audience, or even in public in places where members of the public could reasonably expect to receive such messages, or where they could readily avoid them.

The freedom or right to communicate covers any medium.  It subsumes the right to seek and receive information and opinion on almost any subject^[5]. 

The obligation of a State to protect the right of its citizens to communicate does not impose an obligation on a State to inform or educate its citizenry.  A State would not be required to expose its citizens to options, to "temptation".  A State may be quite passive or restrictive in the scope of the information it disseminates to its citizens.  It may, for example, rigidly and conscientiously promote Islamic precepts, and significantly censor any information in the public domain.  But what a State should be discouraged from doing under international law is to block a citizen's access to information privately sought from whatever source by whatever means.  The public may be kept in the dark; individual citizens may elect to insulate^[6] themselves from all but the most strictly censored information; but no individual adult citizen who wishes to enquire beyond the boundaries of State-sanctioned truth, to be exposed to non-conformist views, to have their beliefs challenged, should be denied the exercise of that right in private. 

Any faith or regime that is so concerned about its adherents or subjects being lured away through the ready access to information that it refuses to endorse the basic human right to communicate in private must be founded on very shaky foundations indeed, and should not be long in toppling under its own hypocrisy.  Would not a confident preacher welcome the temptation of his flock, perhaps regarding it as a tempering of the steel of faith in the fire of life? 

Children and those, such as the intellectually handicapped, senile, or otherwise manifestly unable to give their informed consent, are not covered by the full scope of the right to communicate.  Parents or guardians have the right to manage the information that children are exposed to, and to control their communication.  Children, by definition, are not yet equipped to cope with the full force of adult freedom; they are vulnerable to abuse; they need to be nurtured and protected until such time as they are able to spread their wings and fly out of the nest unaided.

The right of the adult individual to communicate in private does not preclude socially sanctioned agencies from intercepting communications, and using the information gained to avoid criminal acts and/or as evidence in criminal prosecutions.  Clearly the power of such agencies to intercept communications^[7] is vulnerable to abuse, and an infringement of the right to privacy^[8].  It is a power that should be used exceptionally, and be subjected to institutional checks and balances.