The Media and Human Rights

The Cosmopolitan Promise

Ekaterina Balabanova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415623124
• eBook ISBN: 9781136253874
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent years there has been an explosion in the usage and visibility of the language of human rights, but what does this mean for the role of the media? For evolving ideas about human rights? And for the prospect of shared cosmopolitan values?

Ekaterina Balabanova argues that in order to answer these questions there needs to be a deconstruction of monolithic ways of thinking about the media and human rights, incorporating the spectrum of political arguments and worldviews that underpin both.

Ten case studies are presented which illustrate many of the problems and challenges associated with the relationship between the media and human rights. The examples range from cases of humanitarian intervention to analysis of global human rights campaigning on refugee issues; from immigration and asylum, to genocide, freedom of speech and torture.

Anchored in an appreciation of the political conflicts and compromises at the heart of international human rights agreements, The Media and Human Rights is an invaluable resource for students studying media and human rights, international politics, security studies and political communication.

PART I

1

HUMAN RIGHTS

Key issues

Introduction

For those in the developed world, human rights violations and the resultant suffering are often things that happen to people far away and on a massive scale. Both Mother Teresa and Joseph Stalin, coming from two completely opposite moral positions, talked about the significance of scale in relation to suffering. The former said, ‘If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at one, I will’ (cited in Slovic 2007: 80). Stalin’s statement is more notorious: ‘One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic’ (cited in Moeller 1999: 36).

There are myriad misunderstandings, myths and misconceptions when it comes to public discussions around human rights. Some of these are relatively unimportant. For example, when talking about the human right of freedom of expression, many over the years have been tempted to quote Voltaire: ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ However, the French philosopher did not even say these words. In surely one of the most widely misattributed quotations in history, the true source is Evelyn Beatrice Hall (1906), who attributed this attitude to Voltaire, not the actual words.

Other mistakes are more serious. The Human Rights Blog, run by the 1Cor (One Crown Office Row) barristers’ chambers, lists some of the more egregious errors in human rights reporting in the UK.¹ These range from straightforward (and quite common) mistakes, such as confusing the EU with human rights law (Wagner 2013a), to more misleading ‘facts’ about the costs of human rights court cases (Wagner 2012), or stories about the creation of ‘new’ human rights that already exist (Wagner 2013b).

The rest of this chapter is designed to provide some background about the history and basis for human rights and introduce some of the key questions and debates, such as: are human rights national or international? What role is played by the UN? What are the ‘problems’ around cultural relativism, enforcement and monitoring?

Are human rights national or international?

The contemporary human rights regime demonstrates an important shift about arguments over human rights from the national to the international sphere. Before the Second World War human rights were not a subject of international relations. The exceptions were very few, such as the nineteenth-century efforts to end the slave trade and the twentieth-century work on eradicating slavery. These campaigns resulted in a number of international treaties on the abolition of slavery, such as the Treaty of Washington, 1862, and conferences on the subject in Brussels, 1867 and 1890, and Berlin, 1885. Another area of international cooperation was the development of laws regarding the conduct of war, such as the Declaration of Paris, 1856, the first and second Geneva Conventions, 1864 and 1906, and the Hague Conventions, 1899 and 1907. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was created in 1864 and thereafter contributed to efforts to persuade Western governments to adopt treaties obligating them to correct injustices (such as stopping the slave trade from Africa and providing neutral medical assistance to the sick and wounded in war). After the First World War treaties and declarations were signed in Central and Eastern Europe in which individuals from minority groups were afforded certain rights of petition to international bodies in order to try to prevent discrimination by the national majority. However, the League of Nations – the first universal intergovernmental organization, created after the First World War, and predecessor of the UN – remained silent about human rights as a system of universal norms, and debates on this topic were largely excluded from inter-war international relations.

The present system of international human rights norms, as distinct from what had existed previously, emerged only in the 1940s. On an intellectual level, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous ‘four freedoms’ speech of 1942 provided an impetus. In it he explicitly linked the war effort with the freedoms of speech, of religion, from want, and from fear. These freedoms were later an essential component of the International Bill of Rights. But it was the reactions to the atrocities of the Second World War that marked the start of the current ‘era of human rights’, for they ended the view that it was up to individual states to determine how to treat their citizens. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries violations of the human rights of a country’s own nationals were not considered matters of international concern. However, there were 56 million military and civilian deaths in the Second World War, including six million European Jews, Roma, homosexuals, disabled people and others who were considered a threat or ‘unworthy of life’ killed as part of a programme of deliberate extermination – the Holocaust. The war led to huge numbers of refugees in Europe, while Japan was seriously affected by the detonation of two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki – many died instantly and tens of thousands of initial survivors suffered later as a consequence of radiation exposure.

Arguably for the first time, the human impacts of state action or inaction – as a result of the war crimes committed in the war – became of central importance, and human rights became a central concern. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (1945–6) prosecuted Nazis under the then novel charge of‘crimes against humanity’ – German soldiers and officials were held liable for offences committed against individual citizens, not states, and individuals who were often fellow nationals, not foreigners. This is significant, and it was revolutionary because it made human rights an international issue, rather than the almost exclusively national concern they had been up to that point. Also, the idea that all individuals have fundamental rights in peace and war was furthered, notwithstanding some well-founded criticism of bias and ‘victor’s justice’.

Have we always had human rights?

In the words of Mother Teresa, ‘Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being’s entitlement by virtue of his humanity’ (Teresa 1994). Although apparently benign, this is a deeply political statement. From Mother Teresa’s perspective, human rights are the natural-born rights of every person, and they are equal rights because every human being has them equally and may claim them irrespective of who they are, what they do or where they live. As Hamelink (1994: 58) puts it, human rights provide a ‘universally available set of standards for the dignity and integrity of all human beings’. They are, according to this definition, essential for everyone to enjoy a life of dignity; and, as such, violations of human rights deny a person’s humanity.

According to this view, the ideas behind human rights have always been present throughout history in different societies and civilizations, but they have evolved and have been called various things at different times. Contemporary human rights concepts can be traced to the so-called ‘Age of Enlightenment and Reason’ of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which provided a favourable socio-structural context. Political philosophers of the time developed the notion that citizens enjoy certain rights – mainly civil or political in nature – in relation to the state. John Locke is associated with the idea of natural rights – the rights of freedom and equality. However, the enjoyment of these rights was seen as fragile, which meant the society and the state were essential devices to guarantee them. The legitimacy of the government depended on its protection of natural rights through positive law and practice. These ideas were further developed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who put forward the idea of a ‘social contract’ whereby the individual surrendered some of his or her natural rights to the state machinery in return for personal safeguards and assistance in the protection of property.

Such theories gained purchase in the eighteenth century and eventually found their expression in two important documents: the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789); and the American Bill of Rights (1791), which forms part of the current US Constitution. The French declaration proclaimed 17 rights as ‘the natural, inalienable and sacred rights of man’, but did not correct the pre-existing inferior legal status of women. The Bill of Rights was based on the idea of universal equality, but in practice created legal protection only for landowning white men. Thus, the rights that these two documents guaranteed were far from ‘universal’, as they were limited on the grounds of gender, skin colour and/or wealth; nor were they comprehensive, as they addressed only civil and political issues. Still, because they asserted individual rights, the two documents can be seen as the precursors to many of today’s human rights declarations.

The difficulties with this view emerge when we recognize that human rights are not given to man by some higher force but rather arise from human action. The problem with Mother Teresa’s claim about entitlement is that ‘human rights’ are not ‘innate’ or ‘natural’ qualities of all human societies but instead represent a social practice ‘founded on a particular conception of “being human”, implemented by particular kinds of mechanisms’ (Donnelly 2013b: 17).

‘Nonsense upon stilts’ was the famous response of Jeremy Bentham to the notion that there were such things as natural rights or natural laws that were absolute or inalienable (see, e.g., Schofield 2003). For Bentham, rights could exist only on the basis of proper legislative processes carried through by governments; they were not innate to humanity. It is important to note this, because a narrative which presents human rights as things that have always existed – simply waiting to be discovered – is open to question. According to the conservative thinker Edmund Burke (arguing against the French Revolution), rights are not universal; rather, societies must fight for them and win them before passing them on to future generations. This was why Burke felt that the freedoms enjoyed by Englishmen did not flourish outside that country’s borders: they were specific to England and related to its unique historical experience – from the Magna Carta in the thirteenth century through to the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ in the seventeenth (Burke 2006 [1790]).

Human rights and the UN: a world government-in-waiting?

Modern differences over the concept of human rights have moved on since discussion over the innate nature of rights and the merits of the French Revolution. In one sense the system put in place in the twentieth century as a response to the events of the Second World War represents a fairly resounding defeat for the Burkean narrative around universality, at least at the rhetorical level. However, various aspects of the contemporary regime continue to provoke discussion and disagreement.

The first formal and authoritative expression of the twentieth-century human rights ‘movement’ was the UN Charter. Ever since this point the UN has remained the dominant international institution dedicated to elaborating international human rights standards. After a series of meetings, the UN Charter was adopted in San Francisco on 26 June 1948. From that moment onwards, all of the UN member states agreed to take certain measures to protect and promote human rights. However, the Charter does not directly address human rights. Rather, the provisions mentioning human rights tend to be promotional or programmatic in character as they refer to the purposes or goals of the UN or to the competences of its various organs. For example, the Charter states that the fundamental objectives of the UN are ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’ and ‘to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women’. Article 1 outlines international cooperation in ‘promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion’ as one of the primary aims of the organization. As a treaty, the Charter is a legally binding document and all member states must fulfil their obligations under it to promote the observance of human rights and to cooperate with the UN to achieve this. However, the language of obligation is nowhere to be found, human rights are not specified, and no concrete mechanism to ensure member states’ implementation of them is established.

Despite this, the UN Charter is the first treaty in world history to recognize universal human rights, and it can be seen as a philosophical, historical, moral and legal document (Carey et al. 2010). The human rights were vaguely endorsed, but they were to be pursued by traditional state diplomacy. All individuals had these rights and sovereign states had to respect them, which was quite revolutionary. But neither the UN itself nor any other organization has ever been given clear supranational authority to enforce the respect of human rights. So, in a way, universal human rights were affirmed and state sovereignty over domestic social issues was reaffirmed by the UN Charter.

The formal codification of the contemporary human rights regime happened via the so-called International Bill of Human Rights, which is the collective name for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted in 1948 by the UN General Assembly, and the two international human rights covenants – the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). As with all documents created by humans at particular points in history, they are imperfect, and affected by the historical, economic, political, cultural and social conditions of their times. Also, as with all international agreements drawn up by diplomats, politicians and experts from diverse backgrounds and cultures, they represent and reflect a series of complicated negotiations and compromises, all of which were embedded in (rather than resolved by) the legal and institutional structures that were built with the intention of putting the concept of human rights into practice.

Out of the three main human rights documents mentioned above, the UDHR is the most important. It is often referred to as the ‘Magna Carta’ of human rights instruments and makes the bol...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Bibliography
• Index