Human Rights, Impunity and Anti-Press Violence: How Journalists Survive and Resist

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.

Tamsin S. Mitchell (PhD Politics) is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of London (School of Advanced Study, ICwS), a former visiting researcher and ESRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sheffield’s Centre for Freedom of the Media (CFOM) and a freelance consultant, most recently for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Previously, she worked for various international human rights and humanitarian non-governmental organisations (NGOs), including for the literary and free expression NGO PEN International, where she managed programmes of research and advocacy in Latin America and Africa and provided support to writers and journalists at risk. Mitchell has taught at several universities, including the University of Sheffield and the University of York in the United Kingdom and the Universidad de los Andes and Universidad Nacional in Colombia, South America.