The Human Rights, Global Equality, and Access to Knowledge: Bridging the Divide — Toward a Universal Framework for Knowledge Justice.

Abstract

One of the most spoken consequences but little taken into consideration aspects of global human rights is access to knowledge. Also even though the right to education and the ability to learn about the culture and the scientific life are formally guaranteed by means of international human rights instruments starting with the Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human rights as well as the international covenant on Economic, social and cultural rights, the structural circumstances in which knowledge is distributed all over the world still reproduce and solidify systemic inequality. The reflected interdependence between human rights and global equality, and access to knowledge is the focus of the present paper as the author holds that denial of knowledge is not merely a deficiency of social dimension but the ultimate malpractice of human capability and dignity. Based on the international human rights law, capabilities approach of Amartya Sen and critical pedagogy by Paulo Freire, the paper talks about four obstacles to a just distribution of knowledge that exist structurally: the digital divide, exposing 2.7 billion people to meaningful internet access; limiting intellectual property regimes that commodify scientific and educational resources beyond the reach of the Global South; lingo-hegemony, with 56-percent of online This paper then analyses the current international frameworks namely the World Summit on the Information Society, Sustainable Development Goals, and the Open Science Recommendation of UNESCO and finds the critical areas of gaps in their enforcement. In response, it proposes a Universal Knowledge Access Protocol (UKAP): a binding multilateral treaty framework structured around four pillars — universal connectivity, mandatory open access for publicly funded research, multilingual knowledge infrastructure, and minimum internet freedom standards. The paper concludes that dismantling knowledge inequality is inseparable from the broader project of achieving substantive global equality, and that without deliberate institutional reform, the knowledge gap will continue to widen in the coming decades.