Journalists are human, with inherent fundamental rights despite Service

_________________

By Fr Joseph Mukiibi

Journalists play a crucial role in informing the public, holding power accountable, and shaping public discourse around the world! However, they face major risks because of their indispensable service! Governments and other powerful actors, seeking to escape scrutiny and stifle dissent, often respond to critical reporting or activism with attempts to silence them.

Threats, attacks, harassment, violence, arbitrary arrest, detention and in the gravest cases, enforced disappearance, and even death for their work, particularly when reporting on sensitive topics, are often the cost journalists pay for maintaining credibility, adapting to changing audience behaviours, and reporting the truth! Ensuring the safety of journalists and ending impunity for attacks against them, is a global priority for safeguarding freedom of expression.

States are under obligation to prevent, protect and prosecute attacks against journalists and create a safe enabling environment for their work through legal reforms, the creation of special protection mechanisms, and protocols to guide effective investigations and prosecutions where attacks occur. A free press is essential to ensure the public’s right to know, so that governments and institutions can be held accountable.

The mass media-human rights nexus involves two different yet overlapping elements that is, the existence of independent media to communicate information to citizens and the extent to which media organisations report on human rights situations such as cases of violation or protection. A country is generally said to respect and protect its people’s human rights if it allows the two elements of the mass media and human rights to prevail.

Journalistic freedom is a human rights matter prevalent in law. Free access to media, and participation in media, are mentioned or implied by several of the human rights instruments, thence, taking journalism and press freedom as human rights is a way of marking their distinctive moral significance.

The right holder's autonomy, their core interests, needs, and freedoms are examples of such duty-grounding aspects of the individual. Such features of the individual ground moral duties to their protection and respect, independent of whether these moral duties are socially or legally recognised!

The rights of journalists to engage in communication are, I believe, also not rights that they hold for their own sake! So, what are they? To get this clear, I sketch the role of a journalist. Like many roles, journalism is defined by constitutive norms, that explain the role's point, purpose, and limits. A journalist aims to bring truth (descriptive and sometimes evaluative) that is of public interest, and that is relatively specific and current, to the audience.

Journalistic communication's audience is open and public. Because of the moral importance and in context, journalists are sometimes permitted to use means that obtain the truth which the ‘ordinary citizen’ is not permitted to use! The first of these, is the human right to education, specifically about current matters of public interest. Each of us needs to know what is currently going on in the world in order to make informed choices about how to live.

Journalists also posses a right to voice public debate, that is, a right to radiate political participation. For each human, there is a powerful interest to have a say in how her community is run. It is not that each person must participate in public political debate, but they should be able to do so, through intermediaries, if need be. I would argue that in the modern world of mass democracies, such participation is often served by journalism.

Press freedom allows journalists to serve an integral role in civil society, that is fundamental to a healthy relationship between the government and the people. And even though our freedom in Uganda is quite young, we strive not to take it for granted. National Independence is at the core of our journalistic values.

In today’s context, Journalists are not only advocating for human rights but also actively defending them. When such a core part of our democratic values is under assault from various fringe authorities, it becomes important for society to internalise human rights as an essential part of the democratic modern world.

Director Communications and Public Relations.

Kampala Catholic Archdiocese.