A new project has been launched to better understand why crimes against journalists so often go unpunished and inform safeguarding of journalists going forward.
Led by Dr Sara Torsner, 'Profiling impunity for human rights violations against journalists: A systematic account of state-based harm and practices of resistance’ will bring together various data sources to collate the evidence surrounding this issue.
"Despite intensified efforts to counter it, high levels of impunity for murder and violence against journalists persist globally”, said Dr Torsner, a Research Fellow in the School of Information, Journalism and Communication.
"This is, in part, due to a lack of empirical data surrounding the issue, which is the problem that the new project aims to address.
“Conceptually, the project challenges the narrow framing of impunity as merely a legal issue, reframing it as a systemic problem rooted in unaccountable state governance. Empirically, it responds to the data deficit underpinning this broader understanding of impunity”
The project aims to close gaps in current knowledge to reveal how the causes and consequences of impunity are manifest across diverse country settings, in order to inform future interventions to protect journalists and their work.
The interdisciplinary research team will develop a new tool known as an ‘Impunity Profiler’ (IP) which will support in-depth assessment of impunity and measures used by civil society to counter it. Informed by ethnographic field work in Indonesia, Mexico and Serbia as well as computer science methods and open data principles, the tool will support better analysis of available data, generate new primary data and support further academic research in this area through a new, replicable methodology, distributed via an online open data repository.
The team will also host a series of online and in-person workshops with both academic researchers and international stakeholder communities, establishing a platform of knowledge exchange to improve the analysis, documentation and countering of impunity for harm against journalists, ensuring that the project’s findings can lead to real world results.
The project is funded through an ESRC New Investigator grant and will be conducted in partnership with UNESCO; Free Press Unlimited; Justice for Journalists Foundation; Article 19, Mexico; The Independent Journalist’s Association of Serbia; and The Alliance of Independent Journalists, Indonesia.