The Human Right to a Public Library

Use the link to access the full text article deposited in SSRN by Kay Mathiesen, Assistant Professor, University of Arizona. The article is forthcoming in the Journal of Information Ethics. The abstract reads as follows: “As a result of the global economic turndown, many local and national governments are disinvesting in public libraries. This paper proposes that governments have an obligation to create and fund public libraries, because access to a public library is a human right. Starting with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and appealing to recent work in Human Rights Theory, I argue that there is a human right to information, which states are obligated to fulfill. Given that libraries are highly effective institutions for ensuring that this right is fulfilled, there is a derived human right to a public library.”