International law is a collection of treaties, conferences, conventions, declarations, and other kinds of negotiated agreements, often administered through international organizations, particularly the United Nations and its many Special Agencies. It has emerged through historical experience from conventions, customs, and aspirations (Nordenstreng, 1984, 2010). It is based on the idea that peace and stability are in everyone’s interest.
Possibly the most famous thought about the path to peace was noted in 431 BCE by Greek historian Thucydides: “If great enmities are ever to be really settled, we think it will be, not by the system of revenge and military success … but when the more fortunate combatant waives his privileges and, guided by gentler feelings, conquers his rival in generosity and accords peace on more moderate conditions than expected.”
Two thousand years and many wars later, Dutch scholar Hugo Grotius (1582–1645) wrote On the Law of War and Peace to propose a set of international laws that would apply to everyone, regardless of religion or their justifications for war. These laws would guarantee fair treatment of prisoners of war, medical care for the wounded, respect for truces, and protection of civilians (Grotius, 1625).
A century later, Prussian scholar Emer de Vattel wrote The Law of Nations, concerned with the moral obligations that are inherent in nationhood. Regarding communications law, he noted: “It is certainly an uncharitable act, and indeed a vital injury to a nation, to spread a false and dangerous doctrine among its citizens” (Vattel, 1758).
Another milestone was the 1795 book Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch by German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who proposed conditions for peace and a parliament of European states. One principle was to forbid acts that would be so outrageous that they would prevent an eventual return to peace; and one example of an outrageous act was incitement to treason.
Thucydides, Grotius, Vattel, and Kant were all well known to humanitarians like Jean-Henri Dunant, who organized the Red Cross and Geneva Conventions in 1863–1864.
Also significant in the nineteenth century was the US Army’s Civil War-era Lieber Code of 1863, signed by President Abraham Lincoln, which required humane treatment of civilians and prisoners of war. The Lieber Code, in turn, influenced the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907, whose main goal was to avert war crimes.
These codes were an attempt to curb atrocities in war and bring nations together in peace. Even if the goal was often elusive, the quest continued through the League of Nations (founded 1920) and the United Nations (founded 1945)
Sources of international communications law (1860s–1930s)
International communications law began with the International Telegraph Conference of May 17, 1865. Twenty European nations signed a treaty agreeing to use Morse Code, to allow the free flow of telegraphy across borders, and to guarantee the individual right to send and receive telegrams. This approach—prioritizing technical cooperation, internationalism, and human rights—would become a hallmark of the international law of communication in radio and the postal service as well. And the institutionalization of communications agreements in a “union” or “conference” continued with the International Telegraph Union in 1875. The ITU continued as the International Telecommunication Union after 1932, and became part of the United Nations as a Special Agency in 1946.
Two other nineteenth-century initiatives in communications law involved the Universal Postal Union, established in 1874, and the Berne Copyright Convention of 1886. In addition to these enduring international organizations, many private non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were formed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to defend human rights and freedom of the press. These included humanitarian organizations, especially the International Committee of the Red Cross/Red Crescent (established 1863), the Geneva Conventions of 1864, the International Peace Bureau (established 1891), and the Nobel Foundation (established 1901).
These new international organizations were part of a movement that also included organizations such as the International Office of Public Hygiene, founded in Paris in 1907 (now the World Health Organization), and the International Criminal Police Congress, started in Monaco in April 1914 (and now Interpol).
Media-related NGOs established during this time included the Institution de l’Union Internationale des Associations de Presse, formed in Antwerp in July 1894; the Empire (later Commonwealth) Press Union, established in London in 1909; the Press Congress of the World, organized in San Francisco, California in 1915; the Inter-American Press Association, established in Washington, DC in 1926; and the Federation Internationale des Journalists, formed in 1927 in Paris. The purpose of these media NGOs was to advocate better conditions for the press (such as cheaper telegraph rates and legal protection for journalists) and to call attention to the great issues and moral purposes of public communication.
The League of Nations incorporated many of the existing international organizations when it was formed as part of the treaty ending the First World War in 1919. The war had been extremely destructive, killing an estimated twenty million, and many heartbroken people expressed a profound hope for a peaceful future.
US President Woodrow Wilson backed the League idea and was deeply disappointed when, in a fit of isolationism, Congress refused to ratify the treaty. Nevertheless, the League began building a peace-seeking international organization in the 1920s.
Recognizing the importance of communications, the League of Nations set up an International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC), whose members included famed scientists Albert Einstein and Marie Curie. It was the forerunner of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
The League also brought media NGOs together in a series of conferences, first with the Conference of Press Experts in 1927 in Geneva, and then also with the Governmental Press Bureaux and Representatives of the Press in Copenhagen in 1932 and in Madrid in 1933. Resolutions from these conferences called for protection of news sources and for avoiding censorship in peacetime.
The media NGOs also called for a study “of the difficult problem of the spread of false information which may threaten to disturb the peace or the good understanding between nations.” The essential factor in fighting false news, the organizations said, was freedom: financial freedom from governments and free access to information (United Nations, 1953).
One initiative of the League’s ICIC was “A League of Minds,” a series of open letters on vital topics. Perhaps the most famous was “Why War?”, a 1933 exchange between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud about the psychological nature of warfare and the prospects for peace. In response to Einstein’s prompt, Freud wrote:
The cultural development of mankind (some, I know, prefer to call it civilization) has been in progress since immemorial antiquity. To this phenomenon we owe all that is best in our composition, but also much that makes for human suffering. … On the psychological side two of the most important phenomena of culture are, firstly, a strengthening of the intellect, which tends to master our instinctive life, and, secondly, an introversion of the aggressive impulse, with all its consequent benefits and perils … By what ways or by-ways this [end of war] will come about, we cannot guess. Meanwhile we may rest on the assurance that whatever makes for cultural development is working also against war. (United Nations, 1933).
Another of the League’s ICIC programs focused on cinema cooperation. The International Educational Cinematographic Institute was established in Italy in 1928. In conferences and publications in the 1920s and 1930s, the institute became a forum for discussion about the social role of film and topics such as archival film preservation. The institute had a wide latitude for discussion, despite its location in then-fascist Rome. In fact, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his friends were film enthusiasts and deeply involved in the institute’s operation (Druick, 2007). The institute was successful despite being subjected to continuous economic and political controversy (Taillibert, 2020).
Yet another program for international cooperation, this one for radio telegraphy, was already in its third decade when the League started. The cooperation began in 1903 after an incident in which an American Marconi station refused to relay a message from a German ship. The message was simply a thank-you from a departing diplomat to then-US president Theodore Roosevelt. The problem was that the German ship was using a German radio, and not Marconi technology, so the Marconi station refused the message, and there was no other way to send it.
This kind of snub was not unusual at the time. Legally, it’s called “refusal to deal” and is considered anti-competitive behavior. It became illegal in the US following the Radio Act of 1912 and the Motion Picture Producers Association antitrust case of 1915. Because of the snub, and also because of the danger that emergencies could go unreported, the government of Germany organized the first International Radiotelegraph Conference to set rules for radio messages. By 1927, the group was allocating international frequencies and coordinating technical issues at its conferences. The IRC merged into the League in 1932 as part of the re-named International Telecommunication Union.
Short-wave radio was a technical improvement that required more international cooperation when it was introduced in the late 1920s. Short-wave radio broadcasters like the BBC, Paris Mondial, and Germany’s RRG could suddenly be heard across Europe, and sometimes thousands of miles away. The League of Nations began its own broadcasting service called “Radio Nations” on short-wave frequencies in 1929. The voice of the League was formulaic and bureaucratic, and it could have been used more effectively during the Ethiopian crisis or the other small wars of the 1930s, critics said. The problem was that the “most vital function of radio” was neglected: advocacy of the League of Nations at the time when “everything depended on mobilizing public opinion for world peace and order” (Childs, 1943).
One temporary League success involved a diplomatic response to complaints about a 1931 German broadcast featuring circus clowns telling offensive Polish jokes. The Polish government protested, and a bilateral treaty between Germany and Poland to minimize disparagement in radio broadcasts was accepted. (Obviously, this did nothing to stop the Nazi invasion of Poland in September, 1939 or the atrocities that the Nazis committed during World War II).
United Nations and UNESCO, 1940s–1950s
The League of Nations could not prevent World War II, but it did create precedents for international cooperation. Many people agreed with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt when she wrote in 1938 that the world needed a new League of Nations. In her book This Troubled World, Mrs. Roosevelt argued that a new league should have the power to exert economic boycotts and, when necessary, send an international police force to fight against aggressor nations. She also said that the mass media had not necessarily been an instrument of goodwill and peace because they were not free to express the will of the people. “If these sources of information are not really free, should not the people insist that this be one of our first reforms?”
Freedom of knowledge and expression were key points in the 1940 Sankey Declaration, a charter of rights written primarily by H.G. Wells at the outbreak of World War II. It is one of the cornerstones of international communication and human rights law. “Invention and discovery have so changed the pace and nature of communications round and about the earth that the distances which formerly kept the states and nations of mankind apart have now been practically abolished,” Wells wrote. “At the same time there has been so gigantic an increase of mechanical power, and such a release of human energy, that men’s ability either to co-operate with, or to injure and oppress one another, and to consume, develop or waste the bounty of nature, has been exaggerated beyond all comparison with former times. This process of change has mounted swiftly and … is now approaching a climax.” The answer would be to build institutions of peace “upon a world scale” (Sankey, 1940).
The term “United Nations”—first coined by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1942—became the label for the new league by 1943. Diplomatic meetings in 1944 laid the foundation, and as the Second World War ended and the survivors cleared away the rubble, desperate hopes for peace animated the restructuring of world institutions and international communications.
These hopes focused on the United Nations Charter, ratified October 24, 1945. It emphasizes in its preamble a “faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” And it also proposes “to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained.”
In a New Year’s Eve column, New York Times columnist Arthur Krock said that the year 1946 had been “the high point of achievement” in US history. In an article entitled The Mightiest Year in Our History, Krock placed “the creation of a new world order to make and maintain peace” on the year’s list just after military and scientific success.
Only a month after the UN Charter was ratified, delegates met in London to establish one of the new specialized UN agencies—the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Along with the ITU, UNESCO and other agencies not only harmonized technical issues like radio frequencies, postal exchanges, and telegraph rates, but also began to sort through the larger issues of human rights, economic recovery, and media development. What the delegates hoped to build was a structure for international law that would “safeguard and promote freedom of information.”
UNESCO was the world’s “chief hope” for building peace, its organizers said (Fine, 1945). The commitment was clear in UNESCO’s Charter:
Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed … Parties to this Constitution, believing in full and equal opportunities for education for all, in the unrestricted pursuit of objective truth, and in the free exchange of ideas and knowledge, are agreed and determined to develop and to increase the means of communication between their peoples … [and to] promote the free flow of ideas by word and image…(UNESCO, 1945)
America’s foremost legal scholar at the time, Alexander Meiklejohn, served as a delegate to the UNESCO founding conference. He wrote: “No one who attended the London conference could fail to feel the passion, the desperate determination, which ran through all its deliberations and decisions.” The attendees were ‘intellectuals,’ he noted, but “their logic was not cold. It was on fire” (Meiklejohn, 1946). Among early ideas were a global educational exchange and a worldwide broadcasting network.
To bridge one of the most difficult global divides, UNESCO Secretary Julian Huxley proposed a worldwide common philosophy of peace that might reconcile the Soviet Bloc and Western Europe. The idea was rejected by the delegates from Soviet-dominated countries, since, said delegate Vladislav Ribnikar, free circulation of thought would simply open the door to fascist propaganda. He hoped the West would accept Marxist principles, which he claimed were the only ideas that could advance human progress (The New York Times1946b).
It remained for one great statesman to point out exactly what that thinking meant. “A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory,” said Winston Churchill in a March 5, 1946 speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. He continued:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia … subject in one form or another … to control from Moscow … This is certainly not the Liberated Europe we fought to build up. Nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace.(Churchill, 1946)
Freedom of information was essential, the UN said in a resolution passed May 8, 1946. It was supported by the US, China, France, and India. The US press chimed in too. “It’s up to UNESCO to free the press, movies and radio of senseless restrictions,” one US delegate said (The New York Timesa). Soviet Russia also endorsed the concept of a free press, in its own way; it said that the press should be free from capitalist control. Printing and broadcast equipment should be the property of the workers to express their opinions. And it was only the progressive forces of the Soviets that could liberate emerging former colonies like India, Indonesia, and Indochina, according to Radio Moscow (United Nations, 1953).
As the Russian grip tightened on Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the rest of Eastern Europe, control of publishing and broadcasting was one of the first orders of business. There was no ambiguity. Publishers and radio broadcasters either did what they were told, or they were jailed, exiled, or executed under the Russian Soviet system.
By 1947, UNESCO delegates were urging educational organizations to find ways to remove barriers to free information and “attack” the “Iron Curtain.” Polish and Czechoslovak delegates to UNESCO responded by denying that any “iron curtains” even existed in their countries (The New York Times, 1947).
The estrangement between former allies was also evident at a spring 1948 conference on freedom of information in Geneva. The conference was aimed at improvements in the means of sending information across frontiers, and, idealistic UNESCO leaders hoped, would be regarded as the Magna Carta of freedom of thought and expression. That seemed unlikely to Western observers, since one of the resolutions condemned propaganda or false news designed or likely to provoke a threat to peace or aggression. The implication was that defamatory broadcasts or publications should be censored by governments in the interest of peace (Goldberg, 2006).
Against this backdrop, it became clear that a strong international code with basic human rights guarantees would need to be articulated, both in response to the barbarous acts of the Nazis in the Second World War and also now in response to Russian communist totalitarianism.
A UN committee chaired by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt created the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the resolution supporting it passed without opposition at the General Assembly on December 10, 1948. Article 19 is especially important in the history of communications. It says:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt holds the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The above is excerpted from Chapter 12 of Revolutions in Communication by Bill Kovarik, Bloomsbury, 2025. The chapter starts with this brilliant quote:
“It was early in the Seventeenth Century that Francis Bacon remarked on three recent inventions already transforming the world: the compass, gunpowder, and the printing press. Now the links between the nations first forged by the compass have made us all citizens of the world, the hopes and threats of one becoming the hopes and threats of us all. In that one world’s efforts to live together, the evolution of gunpowder to its ultimate limit has warned mankind of the terrible consequences of failure. And so it is to the printing press—to the recorder of man’s deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news— that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to be: free and independent.” US PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, address to the American Newspaper Publishers’ Association, April 20, 1961
ALSO SEE:
Council on Foreign Relations – Six International Organizations
Media Defense – Key principles of international law