The relevance of this conversation would only become apparent to me later after I had carried out my assignment. After attending numerous workshops and acquainting ourselves with our surroundings, my Canadian friends and I met our parent organization where we were to be given projects as the main focus of our internship. I was bewildered on hearing my task: My partner and I were to find out which UN conventions had been signed and ratified by the Bolivian government. Looking at the organizer of this large, well-respected human rights organization, and thinking about these conventions which were supposed to be the most obvious of tools to use in defense of basic human rights, all I could ask was: "Don't you know?" My query was met with a shrug, and I was told that they had hired a lawyer to do the task, but the final conclusions were controversial since no one who read the report seemed to agree with her findings. Local lawyers and human rights advocates couldn't reach many conclusions about which international conventions had been signed and which had not.

And so the adventure began. We visited numerous libraries and organizations and compared Amnesty International publications, UN publications and university web-sites, in an effort to find a degree of consensus on the issue. I was very surprised to find that not only was information hard to find, but the information that we did manage to piece together was incomplete and/or conflicting.

United Nations conventions are (in theory) vital tools that lawyers and academics use to develop the legal system of a country. Once a convention is signed, political leaders and lawyers of a country must work to ensure that the laws on their books correspond with the intent of the convention. Only when their laws are in line with the convention can the country ratify the convention. This does not mean that the new laws will be followed and everyone will live happily ever after. Still, if a country signs and ratifies the torture convention and subsequently people are arrested and mistreated, they have the option of going to the United Nations to denounce their mistreatment. The United Nations can review the case, then it can go back to the country in question and recommend a number of measures, such as reforming their police force. The UN convention process is criticized by many for being quite subtle in its approach; however, for witnesses and victims of injustices in a given country, the conventions are important symbols of change. Therefore, we were shocked that information pertaining to Bolivia's conventions was difficult to find. Unless other human rights advocates elsewhere in the country had a better idea about what had been signed and ratified and what had yet to be done, it indicated that the legal system could be in jeopardy.

This whole frustrating experience led me to reflect on those previous discussions about the Bolivian media and freedom of expression versus access to information. I was left with several new insights. Bolivia may have laws governing access to information, but pertinent information is still not easy to come by. Resources are severely limited when it comes to financing studies and fact-finding missions, and works that have been done previously are not always readily available. Even when pertinent information is found, it may not reach the newspapers, since there may be simply no market. One is more likely to see images of naked women and people being arrested than an article about the latest UN convention.

These lurid images find a market perhaps because, given the social context, this is what is understandable; an estimated 25% of adults in Bolivia cannot read as a result of poor access to education (this figure is, not surprisingly, open to much dispute). The vast majority of print media is published in Spanish, effectively alienating monolingual Aymara and Quechua-speaking peoples. Striking images are accessible, and understandable, thus marketable.

In this context, the numerous workshops that I attended took on new significance. They are one of the vehicles used by concerned citizens to gather and share information that is otherwise not addressed by the media.

It is ironic that in an 'information age', obscured by lurid headlines and pictures, the pursuit for basic, pertinent information is still elusive.

Vanessa Gordon, who recently graduated with a B.A. in Political Science from McGill University, will continue her studies in Comparative Ethnic Conflict at Queen's University of Belfast, Northern Ireland. During her spare time, she plays the violin with Montreal's Serenade Chamber Orchestra and goes salsa dancing. She worked part-time at The Centre for Literacy while in college and university.