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Journalists as Human Rights Defenders: International Protection of Journalists in Contexts of Violence and Impunity

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Reporting Human Rights, Conflicts, and Peacebuilding

Abstract

Many local journalists covering issues like corruption and organised crime can be considered human rights defenders (HRDs) exposed to high levels of violence and impunity. In this chapter, Mitchell examines what protection is available for such journalists via the dedicated international normative framework. She then explores the overlap between such journalists and the HRD concept, before outlining the international protection regime for HRDs and how it compares to the equivalent journalists’ system. Given the similarities between the security situations of such journalists and HRDs and the challenges faced by the regimes, she suggests there are ways international actors can better collaborate that could potentially lead to improved protection for both groups—albeit on a small scale in the absence of increased resources and political will.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Bennett et al. (2015: 884) term the system of international protection for HRDs an “international protection regime” on the basis of Krasner (1982: 185)’s widely cited definition of an “international regime”: “principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge in a given issue-area”.

  2. 2.

    This is not surprising given the tradition of war reporting and the fact that most international humanitarian law substantially predates the UN Declaration.

  3. 3.

    The term “protection mechanism” is variously and under-defined in the literature on the protection of HRDs. In this chapter, I follow several authors who use the term broadly to refer to all formal, that is, official, protection measures, including laws, institutions and special procedures at national, regional or international/UN level, for example, Bennett et al. (2015), Nah et al. (2013: 410–412) and Penchaszadeh et al. (2013: 451).

  4. 4.

    For example, at UN level, various treaty bodies and the Universal Periodic Review process; at Inter-American System level, protective measures ordered by the IACHR or IACtHR.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of York (Centre for Applied Human Rights), York, UK

    Tamsin Mitchell

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  1. Tamsin Mitchell
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Correspondence to Tamsin Mitchell .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Right to Access Information Commission (RAIC), Freetown, Sierra Leone

    Ibrahim Seaga Shaw

  2. Centre for Media, Human Rights and Peacebuilding, London, UK

    Senthan Selvarajah

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Mitchell, T. (2019). Journalists as Human Rights Defenders: International Protection of Journalists in Contexts of Violence and Impunity. In: Shaw, I.S., Selvarajah, S. (eds) Reporting Human Rights, Conflicts, and Peacebuilding. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10719-2_14

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