Human Rights, Impunity and Anti-Press Violence

Human Rights, Impunity and Anti-Press Violence is a qualitative, comparative and interdisciplinary exploration of journalists’ responses to impunity for anti-press violence in two Latin American partial democracies, Mexico and Honduras. It is the first book-length analysis of the security and protection of journalists who can also be seen as human rights defenders. The book draws on 89 interviews with such journalist-defenders and organisations that support them, carried out in 2018 and 2022/23. It shows how journalists use several interlinked strategies to seek justice and protection: domestic and international strategies (“protection approaches,” or making rights demands of the state, often via intermediaries), and activist and professional strategies (“self-protection approaches”).

Critical of international relations scholarly debates on the value of international human rights law/norms to local civil society, Tamsin Mitchell demonstrates that while protection approaches based on such standards are important and valued, they are not enough: self-protection is central – and increasingly so. She advocates the need to take a more bottom-up and inclusive approach to civil society and the importance of alternative, non-legal norms in (self-)protection and truth- and justice-seeking.

Suitable for both academics and practitioners, Human Rights, Impunity and Anti-Press Violence prescribes new areas of research and debate in international relations, global studies, human rights and media/journalism studies.