Expanding Human Rights, Estonia style

http://bit.ly/bB9h2Q

Earlier in the semester our class discussed the different generation of rights and their implications. As a quick reminder the third generation rights as considered to include solidarity rights and the right to benefit from “the common heritage of mankind” that can include scientific or technical progresses. I am focusing on the third generation of rights because I have become focused on a country, Estonia, which has declared access to the Internet as a human right.

Estonia is a small country, its land mass and population are both smaller than the state of Nebraska, and has only been independent, in total, for about 30 years. Their motivation for equal access of information is probably quite evident because they were part of the U.S.S.R. where information was severely restricted. Yet this grand move, I believe, puts Estonia in a unique human rights position. The United States, and other countries, brag about being a free country but does the U.S. give fair access to the Internet? Moreover, did it allow for fair access to the Internet during the mid-1990s? The answer is no and some Americans, I think, would say that it is not the governments responsibility to provide equal access to the Web.

Obviously, Estonia and America’s positions were quite different. Estonia had a clear agenda after the Cold War, which was to integrate into Europe and find protection from its big, and formerly occupying, neighbor known as Russia. Still, Estonia did not have human rights include access to the Internet in order to be integrated into NATO or the EU.

Thus, I believe Estonia’s reasoning was that the UDHR implicitly requires free and fair access to the Internet. Article 19 gave the right to receive information “regardless of frontiers” and Article 27 gave people the right to “enjoy and share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” Estonia wanted to be integrated and viewed as a liberalized western democracy and because of this they took the UDHR’s articles to heart.

This then leaves me pondering three questions. First, will newly emerging states that want to be integrated into Western entities always take the UDHR and human rights as far as they possibly can? Secondly, are the UDHR’s Article 19 and 27 really feasible for every person in the world or are there certain financial restrictions that will just not allow for these articles to be fulfilled? Finally, is this linked article really right? If a country makes access to Internet a human right then does that country also have to make security of the Internet one of their forefront concerns?