A2K3: Access to Knowledge as a Human Right

Building on the opening remarks, the second panel addresses Human right and Access to Knowledge. Caroline Dommen, director of 3D, an advocacy group promoting human rights consideration in trade agreements, emphasizes the need for metrics: how can we tell how open countries are? She suggests borrowing from the experience with human rights measurement. For example measuring the availability of a right, nondiscrimination in access, economic access (is it affordable?), acceptability or quality or the available good. She also suggests using the 4A human rights approach of 1) respect 2) protect and 3) fulfill the rights. There are corollary obligations: 1) non-discrimination 2) adequate process (including redress of violated rights) 3) participation 4) effective remedy.

Marisella Ouma, Kenyan team researcher for the African Copyright and Access to Knowledge Project, says that most African countries have had copyright laws since independence (starting with Ghana in 1957). She is concerned about the educational aspect of access to knowledge and related results of the educational materials access index: the highest ranking is Egypt and the lowest is Mozambique. So, why? What are the issues? Ouma notes that these countries have the laws but not strong policies: she asserts they need a copyright policy that acknowledges the basic fundamental right to education so there isn’t a conflict between property rights and the right to access educational information. She is concerned that people don’t understand copyright law and this makes advocacy of their rights difficult. She is also concerned that policy is not comprehensive enough: For example in Kenya or Uganda, the education policy is limited to basic education. She also describes the sad situation of there being billions of dollars available to build libraries but no money to stock them with information. Something is really wrong here. She notes that wireless internet is important for this, and how many people really have access? So how do they access the knowledge? she asks.

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