Electronic media and human rights

Censorship in the Arab world is still rife, extending to all forms of media including print, television, radio and internet. However, the internet has also become a tool used to get around this censorship and for freedom of expression to find an outlet.

This research looks at the extent to which electronic media has influenced the course of human rights in the Arab world and to what extent human rights organisations are using electronic media to further their cause. The study focuses on women’s rights, minorities and tolerance, refugee rights and personal privacy. A number of issues and challenges thrown up include: 

• language: differences in dialects mean the same word can have different meanings or metaphors are used rather than direct language e.g. the term ‘rape’ in some cases referred to stories about confiscated land. 
  
• lack of previous references and studies: this research is one of the first of its kind, so there is no baseline data or other analysis available for comparative purposes 
  
• impermanent nature of electronic commentary: to what extent can user interactivity with information, such as comments made on blogs or in discussion fora be taken into account when measuring human rights awareness and impact?
  

The study concludes that, of the cases that were researched:

• news websites showed a heavy coverage of human rights abuses, with a greater focus on women’s rights and minority rights (amongst the areas selected by the researchers). In some cases, ‘human rights’ themselves are portrayed as a Western value and emphasis is on indigenous (mostly religious) alternatives. The research also exposes double standards belying the ideology behind some of the news websites
  
• human rights organisations in the Arab world neglect the full capacity of the internet for supporting their work and getting around censorship under authoritarian regimes. In many cases, organisations lacked awareness of basic internet tools such as hosting and disseminating publications, discussion fora, RSS feeds and mailing lists, and lacked technical know-how.