Today there is more need than ever to stand up for Human Rights.  There are wars and disregard for human rights in Ukraine, Iran, Afghanistan, Burma, as well as many other places around the world. This means we need to keep informed and always thinking about how we can raise awareness of human rights issues.  

The slogan for this year’s Human Rights Day on 10 December was “Dignity, Freedom, and Justice for All” with the call to action as #StandUp4HumanRights. The 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) will be celebrated on 10 December 2023. Ahead of this milestone celebration there will be a year-long campaign to showcase the UDHR by focusing on its legacy, relevance and activism. Take a look at the terrific video below.

I was fortunate to mark this year’s Human Rights Day listening to a PEN sponsored event with the fabulous Peter Greste. 

Peter had a 30-year career as an award-winning foreign correspondent for the BBC, Reuters, CNN, and Al Jazeera, reporting from some of the world’s most volatile places. He was based in Afghanistan, former Yugoslavia, Latin America and Africa, and covered conflicts across those regions and in the Middle East. He is best known for becoming a headline himself when he and two of his colleagues were arrested in Cairo while working for Al Jazeera and charged with terrorism offences. In letters smuggled from prison, Peter described their incarceration as an attack on press freedom. He was released after a long international campaign. His book The First Casualty is a must read.

The news media has traditionally been viewed as the guardian of the public interest and as a watchdog on the activities of government. Yet much of the contemporary press are reliant on private business – and a model that that has changed completely thanks to the internet.  Greste asked us to reconsider journalism as a public good rather than a commercial enterprise and for us to develop of a set of regulatory and funding mechanisms to make it serve that purpose. 

As a former journalist, I was horrified to understand that some journalists now have KPIs surrounding the number of eyeballs or views that each one of their stories brings the news organisation.  It explains some of the strange headlines that I see online.  Why write about human rights or local council issues when a story highlighting a celebrity doing something inane is likely to draw more views and thus mean job success for you?

Whatever happened to the objectivity of journalism?

I highly recommend listening to Peter Greste talk about human rights and the importance of a free press in an interview with Margaret Throsby, who is famous for her interviews with high profile people linking them with their favourite music.