Human Rights Media

The media are central to issues related to human rights. Everything related to the monitoring, protection, promotion, and enforcing of human rights depends on communication. This entry describes the efforts of organizations, institutions, and individuals in lobbying and organizing for the recognition and enforcement of human rights through the use of a great variety of media.

In Buenos Aires, a group of women wearing white scarves, mothers of people who disappeared during the last dictatorship, perform their weekly march demanding truth and justice. In London, during G20 protests, a witness documents the police clubbing a demonstrator who died moments later; almost immediately these images are up on an interactive website for the world to see and demand accountability. On International Women's Day in Tehran, a young man with a scarf on his head is wearing a T-shirt with the inscription “Death to Patriarchy.” In California, a comic-strip style booklet on sexual harassment is distributed among day laborers, most of them immigrant women. In the United States, on the television show Freedom Files, a woman explains her opposition to the death penalty and why she lobbied against the execution of her daughter's murderer.

Human rights activists in practice have demanded and exercised the right to communicate, even without any official acknowledgment of the endorsement of this right in UN documents and often risking their lives in extremely dangerous situations. They have been, and are, pioneers in developing human rights media and in highlighting the centrality of the right to communicate. Article 19 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) ensures the right of every individual to “freedom of opinion and expression,” which includes the freedom to “seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” The People's Communication Charter, an unofficial initiative, outlines specifics of several communication rights and is an important reference for those working to ensure those rights.

This entry first discusses the concept of human rights and its definition in various international legal documents. It then describes the two central goals of human rights media—documentation and intervention—and examines their producers and their audiences, as well as the formats in which they appear. Lastly, it presents a series of examples that convey the variety of human rights media in [Page 228]different global contexts and political environments, and fulfilling diverse goals. It concludes with a look at the impact of human rights media and how it can be assessed.