Mediating Human Rights Media, Culture and Human Rights Law

Drawing on social-legal, cultural and media theory, this book is one of the first to examine the media politics of human rights. It examines how the media construct the story of human rights, investigating what lies behind the apparent media hostility to human rights and what has become of the original ambition to establish a human rights culture.

The human rights regime has been high on the political agenda ever since the Human Rights Act 1998 was enacted. Often maligned in sections of the press, the legislation has entered popular folklore as shorthand for an overbearing government, an overzealous judiciary and exploitative claimants. This book examines a range of significant factors in the mediation of human rights, including: Euroscepticism, the war on terror, the digital reordering of the media landscape, , press concerns about an emerging privacy law and civil liberties.

Mediating Human Rights is a timely exploration of the relationship between law, politics and media. It will be of immense interest to those studying and researching across Law, Media Studies, Human Rights, and Politics.

Table of cases, List of acronyms, Chapter 1: Introduction, Chapter 2: A villains’ charter? Human rights and news framing, Chapter 3: Liberty versus rights: mapping the fault lines in Britain’s human rights polemic, Chapter 4: The press, privacy and the Human Rights Act, Chapter 5: Extradition, human rights abuse and the sufferer nearby, Chapter 6: Mediating the human rights message, Chapter 7: Human rights and promotional governance, Chapter 8: Identity and human rights culture, Chapter 9: A human rights culture of some sorts?, Endnotes, Bibliography, Index

Lieve Gies is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Leicester. Her main research interests are in the area of media representations of the law. She is author of Law and the Media: The Future of an Uneasy Relationship, Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish, 2008.