You have a right to know

September 15, 2026

“Human rights exist above the state and beyond history.”

The long-serving well-remembered United States Senator John McCain wrote this, adding:

“They cannot be rescinded by one government any more than they can be granted by another. They inhabit the human heart, and from there, though they may be abridged, they can never be extinguished.”

When he wrote these words, in 2017, he was enunciating a foundational principle of modern governance and international law: Human rights are inherent, irreducible, and unalienable. They cannot be separated from any human being, and power cannot be legitimately exercised unless it honors that living reality.

This same sense of rights as foundational and transcendent, and the recognition that they need not be recognized in written law to enjoy the implicit protection of any legitimate legal system, informs the 2025 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on the legal duty of nation-state governments to protect their people and each other against harm from industrial climate disruption.

The U.S. Bill of Rights does not circumscribe human rights; it specifies, repeatedly, that they are boundless and irreducible. It also clarifies that not only are the specific rights it names protected, but all human rights are protected, inherently. Power is subordinate to human rights, always and without exception.

This is the spirit of the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, and other foundational international law. All of this points to an important clarification:

You have a right to know — to know what is in the foods you eat, how products you might purchase were made, whether that process involved forced labor, whether you are funding activities that are immoral or illegal by making that purchase.

American Constitutional law

In American law, the Bill of Rights carefully and consistently enunciates and protects the right to know:

Freedom of speech;
Freedom of the press — of inquiry and of evidence-sharing;
An irreducible right to pursue legal redress;
A right to keep your own papers — without government interference;
A right to be a witness, and to have witnesses speak in your defense;
A prohibition on arbitrary arrests and trials;
A prohibition on cruelty;
And the clear and historic declaration that rights need not be written into law to enjoy the law’s protection.
The right to know is foundational, such that it can never be abridged by legitimate use of public authority and society is encouraged to organize around it.

The Constitution also requires:

Creation and upkeep of a postal service with roads and infrastructure to ensure all people can communicate and share information freely;
Legislative action to advance scientific inquiry, research, and discovery, as a national mission and as part of the everyday economy;
A federal government that abides by the right to truthful testimony, independent courts of law, and freedom of speech and reporting of fact;
Non-interference with the people’s irreducible right to pursue legal redress for harms caused, acting on the above rights to information.

International Law

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights opens with a recognition that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” and recognition that “reason and conscience” are inherent to being human. It recognizes:

“freedom of thought, conscience, and religion”;
“the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives”;
“the right to education”, including free public education for children;
the right to “free and full development of … personality” in one’s local community.

Climate science and resilience measures are basic services that ensure communities can remain safe, economies can thrive, innovators can do needed, relevant, marketable work, and the project of self-government can be well managed by informed citizens. Image: USGS.

As with the American Bill of Rights, arbitrary arrest is prohibited; political control of speech and reporting is prohibited; and rights not listed retain protection, implicitly, everywhere. The right to know is inherent to the experience of being human and essential to navigating our information-driven modern societies.

While the Declaration itself is not a treaty, it is widely considered to form part of what is known as “customary international law”, given it was designed to inform the establishment of international law and the behavior of national governments toward their own citizens, and it has been cited as doing just that since it was adopted by the General Assembly.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, adopted in 1966, is a binding international treaty, which cites “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” as being “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.

The Covenant also determines that human rights “derive from the inherent dignity of the human person” and affirms “the obligation of States under the Charter of the United Nations to promote universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and freedoms”. This duty to support human rights is also naturally part of being human in community.

The Covenant elaborates on fundamental human rights cited more succinctly in the U.S. Bill of Rights and gives shape to the protection of unenumerated rights. The right to know is inherent in the next, in requirement of the universal rights:

to life;
to freedom from political violence or intimidation;
to think and speak freely;
to gather and report information;
to pursue education and personal development, without being subject to arbitrary controls on freedom of thought, association, movement, or insight-sharing;
to bring witnesses in one’s defense if subjected to criminal trial;
“to take part in the conduct of public affairs, directly or through freely chosen representatives”.

The right to gather information, seek and share knowledge, bear witness to facts and moral imperatives, and to expect that others will also bear witness, truthfully and without fear, is inherent to the protection of human rights and dignity, in all countries. The foundations of international law explicitly recognize this.

Imagine the much-touted fiduciary responsibility — which some interpret as meaning the only obligation is to grow the projected financial value of a client portfolio, while others understand it to be a commitment to make disinterested, good faith judgments on the basis of sound evidence — without access to open flows of primary and secondary information. How would that work?

Where individuals or businesses would prefer not to share so-called “trade secrets”, clients and consumers — and the public authorities tasked with protecting human rights, safety, and dignity — nevertheless retain a right to know whether harm might be prevented by their next decision. The tension between these ideas can be resolved practically, through the sharing of non-proprietary insights and by independent information gathering and reporting.

Freedom of information, information integrity, and a generalized commitment to honor the rights, dignity, and personal freedom to reason and to exercise a moral conscience, are inherent to succeeding against the biggest challenges of our age. People need to have good information, reliable and factual information, as well as accurately translated insights, to decide how best to reduce climate-related risk, locally and collectively.

The right to know is how we can protect human rights, freedom, and dignity, in the age of worsening climate disruption, compounding risk and cost, and an ever more complex polycrisis. Businesses that uphold and reinforce the right to know, that facilitate useful insights getting to consumers, to households and municipalities, to small businesses and larger value chains, will be at the front of the resilience value-building revolution.