When I worked at WITNESS, we debated hotly how to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 2008. We wanted to do something that felt contemporary, that felt open as a campaign, and that anyone – anyone – would have a response to and could run with. What we came up with, and what ended up catching the imagination of quite a few people, was a simple question:
What image opened your eyes to human rights?
To kick things off, I recorded a load of interviews with interesting activists, researchers, journalists and filmmakers when I was at the GFMD conference in Athens. I’ve just put a playlist of these short, sometimes spine-tingling interviews onto YouTube. Here, as a taster, is Mary Robinson’s answer:
As part of its UK Public Opinion Monitor research, which aims to track the UK public’s attitudes towards development, the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex recently released this 10-minute film pleading for better coverage by UK television of the developing world, and of issues related to poverty:
The film revisits arguments advanced over many years by the International Broadcasting Trust (IBT), One World Media (formerly the One World Broadcasting Trust), POLIS, and other civil society groups. [Five years ago, I wrote and researched IBT's report, Reflecting the Real World 2, on how new media were impacting on UK TV's coverage of the developing world.] These groups have consistently put forward the arguments – based on research they conduct and commission, and on interviews they conduct with senior decision-makers in the UK media – that coverage of the developing world by UK broadcast television is weak, and tends to focus on crisis, corruption, and conflict, in both news and other TV genres. They argue that this has serious implications both on how genuinely informed the UK public can be about large swathes of the wider world, and therefore on how constructive domestic public debate and opinion can be about why we give aid, to whom, and on what basis.
It’s encouraging that a serious institution like IDS is interested in addressing these issues. So why does the film itself leave me so disappointed – and what might they have done differently?
I forgot to cross-post this, which I wrote in December for the UNA-USA’s The Interdependent:
How we communicate and connect, how we see and document the world around us, how we express ourselves—all have been transformed over the past decade. Hundreds of millions of us on every continent experience this directly in our daily lives, from receiving a text message or making a mobile call to video-chatting with relatives or colleagues around the world.
As 2011 made so pointedly clear, communication technologies and networks of this kind are now so intrinsic to how many of us live, work, and interact that they are influencing how we think about, claim, and advocate for human rights. As the UN celebrated International Human Rights Day on December 10, for instance, it chose to highlight how “social media helped activists organize peaceful protest movements in cities across the globe—from Tunis to Madrid, from Cairo to New York—at times in the face of violent repression.”
This new reality is something that advocates and activists need to face head-on, urgently and collectively. Human rights concerns are at the heart of the technologies we use, the more domesticated, indispensable and close-to-home they become. But what does this mean in practical terms?
Today in San Francisco, I’m moderating a panel at the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference. I’ll be joined by Steve Grove (formerly of YouTube, now of Google+), Sam Gregory of WITNESS, Hans Eriksson of Bambuser, and Thor Halvorssen of the Human Rights Foundation and Oslo Freedom Forum.
You can watch the video live here, or follow the tireless Katherine Maher’s liveblog here. And we’ll try to take questions via Twitter for about 20 minutes after the panel ends at the hashtag #rightscon.
(After the panel, I’ll add any videos or resources we bring up or show into this page.)
Visual content and human rights - Content has changed our world, how do we manage its impact on society, governance, and privacy?
Panelists: Sam Gregory, Program Director, WITNESS Thor Halvorssen, Founder, Oslo Freedom Forum Victoria Grand, Director, Global Communications and Policy, YouTube
Hans Eriksson, CEO, Bambuser
I’ll be drawing in part on Cameras Everywhere, but what topics and issues would you like me to raise with these panelists? Let me know either via a comment below, or tweet me.
