Report

The Law Section was among the four IAMCR Sections which were established already during the founding IAMCR conference in Paris in 1957. Its first Chairman was Prof. Martin Löffler, a famous German press lawyer, saw media law as a crucial part of communication research and concentrated in particular on national press laws. One of the main line of activities at this time was to compare national legislations in the field of press and broadcasting. At the end of the 1970s Löffler struggled with health problems and could not anymore play the active role he did in the 50s and 60s. In 1984 he resigned.

In New Dehli in 1986 the Law Section was re-established and Prof. Cees Hamelink was elected as the new Chair. Hamelink pushed in particular human rights and international communication law into the centre of the sections work. In 1988 he organized a special symposium on the 40^th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights during IAMCRs annual conference in Barcelona. He invited John Humphrey, one of the authors of the famous Article 19 of the Declaration, as keynote speaker.

When Hamelink became IAMCR president in Barcelona in 1988,  Vice Chair Prof. Wolfgang Kleinwächter overtook the leadership of the section and headed it until 1998.  He continued with Hamelink’s international orientation and concentrated in particular on the concept of the right to communicate and the legal implications of new communication technologies, notably the Internet. Furthermore, in the early 1990s he launched a special research project on the media legislation in Central and Eastern Europe and the former republics of the Soviet Union (BLER Study Group). Two academic symposia – one in Bratislava in cooperation with the Council of Europe at the eve of the Vienna UN World Conference on Human Rights (1993) and another one in cooperation with Bertelsmann Corporation in Warsaw (1994) were among the concrete results of this project. 

In Glasgow in 1998 Prof. Andrei Richter was elected as IAMCR Law Section Chair. Under his leadership the sections continued to deal with freedom of expression and the right to communication, comparative studies on media legislation in different countries, more and more also from the third world, and Internet related legal problems. Members of the section were deeply involved in the work of the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) from 2002 to 2005 and here in particular with regard to Internet Governance. In 2006 the law section, when Kleinwachter was elected a co-chair, co-organized the joint ICA-IAMCR symposium on Internet Governance in Rathen and helped to launch the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GIGANET) and the European Summer School on Internet Governance (EURO-SSIG).

At the 50^th Anniversary Conference in Paris the Law Section discussed the main areas of its activities in the last 50 years - national media legislation, human rights, legal aspects of new ICT and Internet Law – as well as the challenges of the future. The key panelists of the roundtable “50 years of IAMCR — 50 years of the Law Section” devoted to its history were Cees Hamelink, Wolfgang Kleinwächter, Monroe Price and Yassen Zassoursky.

A session was devoted to international efforts in promoting media freedoms and professional standards worldwide, another to case studies in promoting media freedoms worldwide, two more dealt with case studies of Internet governance and WSIS. Total 26 speakers were heard.

Law Section Heads: Andrei Richter (Russia) and Wolfgang Kleinwachter (Germany)

Deputy: Mohammad Sahid Ullah (Bangladesh)