Tactics and tools for the protection
of Human Rights Defenders

The purpose of this report is to discuss the difficulties of reporting human rights issues and establish what lessons can be drawn from different experiences so as to make sound recommendations to the journalistic profession, policymakers, and human rights advocates.

The objective is to improve the quality and consistency of work in this area.
The report is concerned with the media’s capacity to provide accurate, reliable, and timely information on issues that involve human rights. A quantitative study would show that the media devote a great deal of attention to this subject. It would also show that, despite all the attention given, the media fail to report much that ought to be known, at least in the estimation of those who are victims. How should the media’s performance be judged? How should journalists and editors who work in the media judge themselves, when they try to assess the quality of their reporting in this area? This second question raises vast issues and there is no attempt here to be comprehensive.

The objective of the report is not to make a general judgement on performance but to describe why the media do what they do, in the way they do it, when it comes to human rights. It is concerned not with how much the media do or fail to do, but how they go about bringing information on human rights to their publics. How do journalists and broadcasters see their task? How does it compare with all their other tasks? What pressures are brought to bear on
them by parties that, one way or another, may be concerned by their reporting? What would ‘good’ reporting on human rights issues imply?