The Media are human rights defenders by the virtue of the work that they engage in on a daily basis. The media plays a very important role in ensuring that HRDs work in a safe environment, for instance by exposing violators of the rights of HRDs. The media further contributes heavily in creating awareness on the existence of HRDs and the roles of the HRDs in the promotion, protection and fulfillment of human rights.
These roles played by the media in HRDs work provided n excellent opportunity for the engagement with the KNCHR through a training that had the objectives of enhancing the understanding of media practitioners on human rights principles and standards, enhancing the media practitioners’ understanding of the need to support the work of human rights defenders and encourage the media personnel to develop a close working relationship with HRDs and to help create an enabling environment for the work of HRDs.
The trainings that have been carried in all the 3 project sites has seen a total of 55 media personnel that are drawn from both the nationwide and community media stations taken through the training for purposes of working for the success of this project. The content for the training included; Understanding human rights and underlying principles, The media and human rights: points of intersection, Role of media in the promotion of human rights, Human rights as a news topic & human rights reporting, Impediments to good human rights reporting and Journalists as human rights defenders.
This training forms a series of engagements that the KNCHR shall have with this group of HRDs within the project period. The KNCHR expects that the training shall provide an opportunity where the media shall give the required support to the HRDs in carrying out their work through airing their stories, inviting them for their shows, giving them the required airtime among others. We shall thus continue to engage the media and ensure that their engagement becomes long term even beyond the project period. We would in next few months be having a joint forum between the Police, the media and the HRDs where the three can openly share their views on how best the three can work complementarily for the benefit of the local population.