More proactive media needed for human rights reporting

IGNORANCE of the basics of human rights — even on the part of some reporters — is abetting the continuing occurrence of summary executions, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, illegal detentions, harassment and disappearances.

This was the assessment of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) and various journalists’ groups as they launched the Philippine Human Rights Reporting Project at the University of the Philippines during a roundtable discussion last Friday.

The monitoring initiative is supported by the Center for Community Journalism and Development (CCJD), National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP), and Mindanews as it highlights the need for a more proactive media in the coverage of human rights in the country.

In a statement, the groups said that human rights conditions, despite the lifting of martial law and even after over three decades, have remained the same. They said the issue does not get enough attention from journalists, some of whom, wittingly or unwittingly, aid the violation of basic human rights through their reportage. “For instance, quite a number among the media think ‘human rights’ is just for activists or leftists. Some think extrajudicial killings are nothing more than police beat stories,” they explained.

Read the statement of principles of the human rights monitoring project.

“Human rights is not a leftist issue. It doesn’t mean you are for the government or against the government,” stressed Alan Davis, special projects director of IWPR.

Human rights issues seldom hit the headline, but when they do, it is likely that the situation had already worsened. This strikes a major concern for media organizations since the issue of human rights, they point out, is not just limited to political and civil rights.

“It is about everything and anything that affects us in our search for a decent life — the right to education and development; the right to culture and information; the right to suffrage; the right to self-determination; the right to fair trade and the right to equitable share to the country’s natural and production resources, to name a few,” said IWPR and its local media partners.

NUJP former chair and Philippine Graphic editor-in-chief Inday Espina-Varona traced the problem of human rights reporting among journalists to the lack of training and financial resources that hinder them to dig deeper and be more critical of human rights violations.” “But most of all, journalists are very, very weak in putting in context, for instance, explaining why victims are killed, arrested or abducted,” she added.

In response, the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) suggested that the media be its partner in monitoring human rights cases. CHR chair Purificacion Quisumbing said the media usually stop pursuing human rights stories after these have hit the headlines, citing the arrest and alleged torture of five supporters of former President Joseph Estrada (referred to in the media as the Tagaytay 5), the ambush of three suspected car thieves in Pasig, and the deaths of several Abu Sayyaf members in detention in Bicutan.

Quisumbing also lamented the lack of any media follow-up on the stories after the commission released its recommendations on these cases.

She therefore urged the media to come out with a “regular monthly report” of human rights cases, a proposal that was inspired by one of the recommendations of United Nations special rapporteur Philip Alston in his report on extrajudicial killings in the Philippines.

As part of the human rights monitoring project, IWPR will be conducting training, outreach programs, information dissemination, among many other things to realize its goal of rooting human rights awareness in the country. “But the key thing is that this is an open project. We very much encourage everybody to get involved—journalists, editors, activists, members of the government, members of the judiciary, ordinary people because essentially human rights succeeds so long as people abide by them,” Davis said.