Translating a right to communicate into policy

There are three challenges inherent to every right: how to formulate it; how to translate it into policy; how to implement it. This paper deals with the second of these challenges: how to translate a right to communicate into policy. The aim of this paper (2002) is to stimulate consideration and discussion of this complex issue. To do so, it looks briefly at two early attempts at moving the right to communicate from concept into policy, one at the international level through Unesco and one at the national level in Canada. It argues that a political strategy must be linked to any policy strategy and concludes with a three-pronged approach to initiate such a process.