"This guide aims to provide information to help improve press coverage of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) on issues relating to the right to freedom of expression, the safety of journalists and access to information with the purpose of improving their ability to inform the public, to a professio
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nal standard, about the various parts of the process and, in doing so, increase the accountability of the various players involved in the review. Journalists themselves are victims of human rights violations around the world. These guidelines are also relevant to helping them understand how to report any violations of their freedom of expression and/or safety that might occur." (About the guide)
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"Recent years have seen the expansion of critical scholarship on humanitarian communication across a range of academic fields, sharing recognition of the centrality of media and communications to our understanding of humanitarianism as an agent of transnational power, global governance and cosmopoli
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tan solidarity. The Handbook brings into dialogue these diverse fields, their theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches as well as the public debates that lie at the heart of the contemporary politics of humanitarianism. It consolidates existing knowledge and maps out this emerging field as an important site of interdisciplinary knowledge production on media, communication and humanitarianism." (Publisher description)
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"[...] This article focuses on how human rights festivals across the world have creatively and resourcefully resisted and adapted to Covid-19. It analyses the impact of this crisis on festival organisations within their contexts and on the global outreach that was possible thanks to the connections
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of the Human Rights Film Network (HRFN). The findings in this article are based on a survey that collected testimonies of how HRFN members responded to Covid-19 between April and November 2020 as well as from a global virtual meeting that was organised in July 2020 as an opportunity to ‘bring us closer together at this time of difficulty and uncertainty, allowing all members to meet, share ideas for online activities to work more closely and collaboratively in the future’. As producers of human rights film festivals who are members of the network and who attended these live meetings, we experienced firsthand the conversations that emerged, the reactions from fellow festival producers, as well as the importance of having such spaces to share concerns and advice. These reports help us understand how human rights festivals across the world have experienced this crisis within their geographic contexts and to ask questions such as: What was the impact of such emergencies on festival organisations in different contexts? What role did creativity, resistance, community solidarity and social networks play in the different local contexts? And finally, what was the role of the HRFN and its global outreach, in terms of connections, solidarity, and sharing of knowledge?" (Pages 275-276)
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"Rights advocacy has become a prominent facet of South Korea’s increasingly transnational motion picture output, especially following the 1998 presidential inauguration of Kim Dae-jung, a former political prisoner and victim of human rights abuses who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000. Today
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it is not unusual to see a big-budget production about the pursuit of social justice or the protection of civil liberties contending for the top spot at the box office. With that cultural shift has come a diversification of film subjects, which range from undocumented workers’ rights to the sexual harassment experienced by women to high-school bullying to the struggles among people with disabilities to gain inclusion within a society that has transformed significantly since winning democratic freedoms three decades ago. Combining in-depth textual analyses of films such as Bleak Night, Okja, Planet of Snail, Repatriation, and Silenced with broader historical contextualization, Movie Minorities offers the first English-language study of South Korean cinema’s role in helping to galvanize activist social movements across several identity-based categories." (Publisher description)
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"Visual imagery is at the heart of humanitarian and human rights activism, and video has become a key tool in these efforts. The Saffron Revolution in Myanmar, the Green Movement in Iran, and Black Lives Matter in the United States have all used video to expose injustice. In Seeing Human Rights, San
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dra Ristovska examines how human rights organizations are seeking to professionalize video activism through video production, verification standards, and training. The result, she argues, is a proxy profession that uses human rights videos to tap into journalism, the law, and political advocacy." (Publisher description)
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"This report summarizes powerful research on the Philippines’ human rights sector in “survival mode” under Rodrigo Duterte’s violent regime. Historically known as the most active civil society in Asia, the Philippines human rights movement has faced an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy whil
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e burdened with the responsibility to advocate for the many victims of abuses. Drawing on interviews with human rights workers and their allies in journalism and the academe, this study captures diverse interpretations as to how human rights has become “broken,” “tarnished,” and “a bad word” within a short span of four years. It also describes sectoral, organizational, and generational conflicts in how seasoned veterans and younger activists have been strategizing differently in their efforts to win back public trust. This study identifies the long- and short-term trade-offs behind organizational strategies of frontlining and speaking out on the human rights abuses of the Duterte regime versus more under-the-radar backchanneling work focused on service delivery and grassroots organization. Taking a strategic communication perspective and worker-centered approach, our study specifically places the voices of the communication and technology workers in the human rights sector at the heart of our analysis. What our research uncovers is that despite their many creative experiments to connect with diverse constituencies, human rights organizations have still failed to invest material resources in sustainable communication infrastructures and empower their communication personnel. Almost half of the organizations we interviewed still had no staff member dedicated to communication or branding; communication workers continued to play peripheral roles in their organizations." (Executive summary, page 8)
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"This study examines the effects of media coverage on the Rohingya refugee crisis based on articles from two liberal, elite newspaper sources, The New York Times and The Guardian between 2010 and 2020. The study reveals that the attempts of international pressure to stop the crisis have increased th
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rough media coverage and political pressures; however, the number of Rohingya refugees fleeing Myanmar intensified due to worsening violence and human rights violations committed by the Myanmar army. Findings are discussed using the lens of cultural and ideological context. The study suggests that in Myanmar, where authoritarian military culture is pervasive, there is a limited influence of the international press on the state-sponsored ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya population and questions whether consistent international pressure could have changed the outcome." (Abstract)
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"This handbook is broadly divided into three sections: this first focuses on understanding business and human rights, its themes and topics. The second part looks at the practicalities of reporting business and human rights stories: from finding ideas and spotting stories through to the process of r
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esearch and carrying out interviews. The third part looks at how you can tell business and human rights stories, and ‘sell’ them to your audience and editors. Whilst some media law is discussed, it is as general introductory information only and should not be construed as or relied upon as legal advice." (Page 8)
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"This report presents the results of in-depth interviews conducted with eight individuals with recent direct experience inside detention facilities in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Findings are based on four face-to-face and four remote interviews conducted between November 201
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9 and May 2020 [...] Many detainees were unclear about the reasons behind their initial arrests and grappled with why they were targeted. Justifications for detaining interviewees included innocuous differences in appearance or behavior, perceived by the state as indicators of religiosity or Uyghur nationalism. Some got no explanation for their arrests. Two participants heard police directly mention being given quotas or financial incentives for Uyghur arrests [...] Participants recommended that RFA continue to convey the reality of the ongoing repression in the Uyghur region in as transparent and high-profile a way as possible. Participants said that international coverage failed to present the reality of Uyghurs’ experiences in the XUAR in sufficient scale and depth. To address this, they recommended that RFA: Continues to provide detailed, factually strong reports about conditions within the XUAR, supported by photographic and video materials whenever possible; Focus on original reporting rather than translating reports from other outlets; Humanize Uyghurs in general and detainees in particular, sharing their real lives and stories, challenging the PRC narrative portraying them as Islamic extremists or terrorists; Broadcast more interviews with émigrés who had direct experience of detention – including those who were detained in pre-trial facilities rather than re-education camps; Translate content into other languages, including Mandarin and Russian." (Executive summary)
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"This book focuses on the reporting of human rights in broadly defined times of conflict. It brings together scholarly and professional perspectives on the role of the media in constructing human rights and peacebuilding options in conflict and post-conflict environments, drawing on case studies fro
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m Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. It also provides critical reflections on the challenges faced by journalists and explores the implications of constructing human rights and peacebuilding options in their day-to-day professional activities." (Publisher description)
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"Sin desconocer el esfuerzo del periodismo por contar las historias, cabe reconocer que se han cometido errores en el cubrimiento, de ahí la importancia de los periodistas, ya que el peso que tiene cada pequeña noticia, escrita o leída, puede convertirse en una pieza clave en la reconstrucción d
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e las historias y la verdad ante una desaparición. Consejo de Redacción (CdR), la Unidad de Búsqueda de Personas Dadas por Desaparecidas (UBPD), el Comité Internacional de la Cruz Roja (CICR) y el Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo (PNUD) decidieron unirse alrededor de este fenómeno para ofrecer una guía que aporte a mejorar el cubrimiento del tema y la construcción de registros de búsqueda de personas. Cada capítulo tiene ideas que dan luz para investigar historias y preguntas inspiradoras, que ayudan a que los reporteros de todo el país puedan remediar sus omisiones y contar todo aquello que aún no se cuenta. Algunos de los temas que se encontrarán son: el repaso histórico de cómo el Estado colombiano aceptó añadir este delito en el código penal, los casos esclarecidos por las cortes, los NN que aumentan la lista de desaparecidos, el daño que ha producido en la sociedad y los familiares la desaparición, el mal manejo de estas historias, entre otros." (https://consejoderedaccion.org)
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"Following a century filled with violations of human rights, a significant number of documentary films have appeared since the first decade of the current century that report these events. Traditionally this process is carried out from the victims’ point of view. However, a new tendency has emerge
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d in which the films deal with the perpetrators’ perspective. It is easy to understand how establishing a relationship with a person who has committed atrocities may be problematic. So, why should we engage with perpetrators? The overarching purpose of this article is to attempt to offer some answers to this question. To this end, two methodological approaches are carried out in parallel: first, this article explores a sample of five documentary films and the filmmakers’ considerations of what their engagement with the perpetrators was like. Second, this article reviews the related literature and the controversial reception of these films by some scholars. In doing so, I also posit a theory that 4Rs (remembrance, recognition, remorse, and redemption) are a necessary prerequisite for the fifth R, of reconciliation. The final elaboration of this schema is mainly based on an example of interpersonal reconciliation." (Abstract)
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"Bringing theory and practice together, 'African Cinema and Human Rights' argues that moving images have a significant role to play in advancing the causes of justice and fairness. The contributors to this volume identify three key ways in which film can achieve these goals: documenting human rights
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abuses and thereby supporting the claims of victims and goals of truth and reconciliation within larger communities; legitimating, and consequently solidifying, an expanded scope for human rights; and promoting the realization of social and economic rights. Including the voices of African scholars, scholar-filmmakers, African directors Jean-Marie Teno and Gaston Kaboré, and researchers whose work focuses on transnational cinema, this volume explores overall perspectives, and differences of perspective, pertaining to Africa, human rights, and human rights filmmaking alongside specific case studies of individual films and areas of human rights violations." (Publisher description)
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"In 2013 I became the co-organizer of the Human Rights, Human Dignity Film Festival in Yangon. We organized the festival for a simple reason - we were very suspicious of the political reform process initiated by the Thein Sein administration, the transformed military government. Like many of our fel
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low citizens, we wanted to push the boundaries of the so-called quasi-civilian rule, by using the human rights film festival as a tool. That's how Myanmar's first international human rights film festival came to be. The landmark human rights event was held in Yangon for five years. A mobile film festival that brought human rights films to audiences across Myanmar also grew in scope. The abolition of pre-publication censorship in Myanmar resulted in a certain level of media freedom for the print media, but not for the film industry. In 2014 the film censorship board was recreated as the "Film Classification Board" under the Ministry of Information. In order to screen human rights films in downtown cinemas, authorization was required from the Film Classification Board. Without that official piece of paper, none of the commercial entertainment companies would allow us to host the human rights film festival in their theatres. Therefore, in order to keep the festival running, we did not select overly sensitive films. That might be called self-censorship; yet, in 2013, the first year of the festival, all films submitted to the Film Classification Board - including a documentary film about human rights violations in Myanmar prisons based on the story of a political prisoner - got the go-ahead to be publicly screened." (Pages 307-308)
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