Hello, good morning to everyone. I am delighted to be part of this conference and I want to take this opportunity first of all to thank the organizers of this conference for inviting me I am very much interested in this topic and it is very much related to the topic I will be speaking on today which is human rights journalism, journalism for social change and social development. This is an area I have developed over the years, the theory of human rights journalism, this led me to publish a book in 2012 called Human rights journalism advances in humanitarian interventions. I collaborated with UNESCO, it was adopted and later I was asked to do a module around humanitarian journalism. 

This area, I think is very important and it is growing so I am sharing my perspective of how I am developed a concept and how it can help to promote social change in the society and also development. First of all, what is impeding in the part of development and social change most times we have conflict and disputes, conflicts and disputes most of the time occur around changes in the world. The world is often disrupted we have seen what happened during the pandemic which disrupted the world order and we are still feeling the effects of the pandemic. This associates the needs for conflict resolution strategies that I have come to research. 

We need to find out how to solve problems and address conflicts. Research can be very keen in this area, that’s research has come to indicate that human rights have become a core of peacekeeping and peace building strategies, studies of the relationship between human rights and conflict resolution show that overtime the relationship between these two concepts has actually transformed from tension to cooperation. This is a very interesting scenario that is developing. being that peace building strategies have now become development goals, an example of this, is most recently in 2015 The Sustainable Development Goals, how are these goals linked with Human Rights Declaration for instance that existed between the conflict human rights and researches have been used to address these underlying issues for example peace building experts and practitioners use contradictory approaches differently to tackle problems and issues which threatens human rights and peace. However they have realized recently that safeguarding and fostering human rights or peace requires an approach that incorporates the perspective of both human rights and human rights advocates with conflict resolution practitioners. 

Today, research draws attention to the capacity of the media for instance how does the media come in? How does journalism come in? And in a very powerful way the media can promote and guide and guide human rights, thus becoming a preferred partner of the peacemaking process worldwide. How is media also related to human rights? The protection and promotion of human rights through the media are embedded in two international human rights documents and instruments. Article 19 for instance of the Universal declaration of human rights, of course, is the international covenant on civil and political rights, all emphasize the rights to seek receive and impact information and ideas, this is a fundamental right. Based on this protections, civil society generally within the local and global context expects activities such as exposing human rights violation, valuing human rights organization, strengthen civil society participation and enhancing tolerance from the media. 

This means there is a huge expectation from journalists to deliver on some of these things and solution although recently the media has been failing in that, particularly when you look at the pool of the international media. This however demonstrates the needs to strengthen the activities of both locally and internationally to encourage the private citizen to be involved in discussions that are usually reserved for official negotiation. This means that when conflict happens only the big guys are invited and involved around the table in the discussion concerning resolution of conflict how do we transform this to involve private citizens so that they can take part in the discussions. 

Behind academic activities media institutions should create discusses on human rights and peace, when you look at the role of the media in relations to the promotion of sustainable development you look at journalism as not only focusing on events but journalism focusing in issues. So, I have developed my concept that if you look at the way journalism is there are a lot of things not framed within the human right concept for example, issues like misinformation, dramatizing events and forgetting the issues. These are challenges that journalist are facing generally. If you look at peace journalism and how it relates to human rights journalism, they are related in the sense that they are both activist kind of journalism practices. They belong to the strands of journalism where they don’t just look at how things are happening, but they look at how they can use journalism to bring about social change. How journalism can be used to bring up issues of corruption, to address issues of mismanagement of public funds, when there are issues like these there is bound to be conflict. 

There are people who are deprived and not enjoying the benefit of development and so they see themselves as being marginalized, pushed to the corner and they result to violent moves to achieve their goals. Journalism can come in and promote sustainable development for instance how do you use journalism to fight against poverty? How do you use journalism to promote quality in education? How do you use general zoom to promote the fight against hunger? How do you use journalism and access to information to promote climate change? And how to promote sustainable development? Journalism should be looked at beyond just reporting news, events, violent episodes or activities. How you position journalist also to be part of the solution of national development, how to resolve conflict and how to build peace. In my book, I developed human right journalism and defined it as diagnostic style of reporting which gives a critical reflection on the experiences and needs of victims and perpetrators of human rights violations because human rights violations are all over the place. How do you handle as a journalist? How do you reports on some of these issues, he puts everything in perspective and you put both of the experiences of those who are not delivering rights to this people. Also the victims of physical cultural human right violations are happening on a daily basis. The human rights journalism is a type of journalism that will stimulate an understanding for the reasoning of this violations for instance of their human rights violation that is really unappealing you would only be able to prevent it from happening in the future if you understand sort of journalism, why it is very important in finding out an investigation so that you will be able to prevent such violations of human rights. It is the journalism that challenges and not reinforce the status quo of the powerful dominance of the voices of society against the weak and marginalized in the promotion and protection of human rights and peace. 

As a matter of fact, this is a journalism that drives development and social change it’s also motivates people and goes beyond just reporting events. It looks like the issues that informs the event, you can only build peace if you think ahead of prepare for conflict so you build the peace and make sure that peace is part of the society. The media has an important role to play in this because without the media it is very difficult. If the media is only playing the role of reporting the events and not looking at the issues, there is a fundamental challenge. When you look at this in the context, what are some of the forces, external forces that are informing such conflict? What are the local or internal dynamics that are informing these conflicts? These are some of the things that the media and the journalists are supposed to look at. Some of the internal dynamics are for instance lack of good governance, corruption, excluding some important voices in society getting them out of the equation. 

When we look at the aspects of war with the idea of negative and positive peace angle, we have a problem. However, this is where human rights journalism comes, also shares the same idea with peace journalism. It is not only in the aspect all war that you’d have to talk about peace. It’s not just absence of war, maybe war has not come yet, and you have to talk about conflicts that are not necessary conflict. Issues of poverty, issues of marginalization, issues of gender discrimination. For instance, there are situations where by women are marginalized and this doesn’t bring about social development because women are also supposed to be part of the development process to be empowered and given equal rights to take positions in the government in both public and private sector. They shouldn’t be treated as people who are supposed to be at home. How are children’s rights protected? What do you do as a journalist to make sure that young people are not exploited in some countries? We see that’s mostly young people are trained and turned into monsters to fight and most of them are supposed to be in school. Where you have like lack of education young people are vulnerable and conflict arises. In conflict situation people who are most vulnerable people are women and children. How do you build peace? How do you discourage situations with conflict? So therefore issues of children’s rights should be on the top of the agenda. 

When you link that to the sustainable development goals as a matter of fact all the goals are very much interdependence this means, the enjoyment of one goal like access to information, Sustainable Development Target (STG) goal 16^* 10 target 2 is public access to information within the human rights perspective you will look at it as the instrumental role human rights should play in the attainment of other goals for instance access to quality education. Public authorities make sure that information is accessible, information about what they are doing. For instance, access to education without access to information is difficult to achieve, people do not address the issue of poverty, the health issues. So human rights and sustainable development are very much interdependent. Having access one target or sustainable development goals, which is for instance access to development, access the quality education, access to health, gender equality. If there is gender discrimination women come and ask what is happening, why is this happening, why do we have domestic violence, violence against women, why we do not have equal opportunities in jobs, job market. All those are the only way to obtain sustainable development goals. Kant, the great philosopher believes in the interdependence between human rights and peace that they overlap. If human rights are not respected in a society, peace will be threatened and disrupted. This is the epistemological foundation of human rights journalism, link between human rights and peace. How journalist fits into the equation to make sure to advocate for both human rights and peace making sure that society is changing for the better or not regression so that’s all the parameters of development and social change are really happening. For instance access to information leads to good governance without access to information it is very difficult to operate in a transparent and accountable atmosphere and with the asked absence of accountability good governance will be disrupted. Defending and promoting human rights and international freedom such as freedom of information, freedom of association, freedom of religion are expected to be key priorities of journalists as well as human rights activists. The role of the media is particularly important in advance in the rights and freedom. People tend to focus more on conflict resolution instead of peace building and for me, for the human rights perspective peace building is more important than conflict resolution in terms of scale of preference, when you build the peace, you prevent conflict. The media can alert and draw the minds of the public if something wants to happen or they suspect that the economy is going down and that will most likely affect the peace. They call the authority together to look into the issue otherwise society will be pushed to result to violence to get what they want. Journalists should serve warnings and they should be very critical looking at the issues away from the idea of partisanships. Because there are many stake holders that benefits from war and conflict the public interest should be the focus of the journalists. 

Martin Bell, famous British journalist and the member of Parliament, reported the Kosovo war, he said, I quote “you cannot stand in between the devil and the angel, if you are reporting a violent situation and you have the perpetrator of violence that is the devil and the victim of the violence, are you going to take the side of the perpetrator and leave the victim or will you be neutral in the face of human rights violation”? That is a serious question we have to really ask from the human right perspective. From the human right perspective you have to take a position. You should carry out justice and push for the peace but you have to look also how are you going to bring about peace within the context of justice? So it means that you have to make sure that justice is served, you negotiate the peace in context of justice. It is give and take. As a journalist you have to look at if a young man who is taking part in violent situation is also a victim maybe at the age of 10 or 12. He has been taught to be a monster by one big perpetrator, war lord. Are you going to condemn that? Aren’t you going to look at why this monster become the monster in the first place? Look at the conflict dynamics, and why people take arms against their own government. We are not justifying the conflict. Why there was a conflict in the first place, what led to the conflict and providing a conflict map to help people get a wider picture of the conflict. It is better to build peace before resolving conflict because by the time you finish resolving conflict many lives would have been lost, many properties would have been destroyed. Building the peace is always better option. That’s why a journalist should focus on peace, promoting sustainable development goals agenda, promoting inclusive societies, fighting against poverty, fighting against injustice fighting against anything will lead people take up arms, so it mean you are preventing the conflict. Conflict prevention should be the watch word of the journalist and this is where human right journalism comes in, to a very large extent it is the complimentary model to peace journalism.