United Kingdom: Human rights TV channel launched
The world’s first television channel dedicated to human rights was launched in London in mid-January 2019 with a promise to deliver hidden stories missed by mainstream media.
The International Observatory of Human Rights (IOHR) said its web-based channel would bring human rights issues to audiences in over 20 countries across Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.
“There are so many people in the world who cannot speak up, and it seems to be getting worse and worse,” IOHR director Valerie Peay told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at the official launch.
Topics will include refugees, press freedom and the incarceration of journalists, extremism, women’s rights and the plight of the world’s stateless people.
“We live in a world of 24-hour news cycles and often stories get lost, and we see human rights being sidelined,” Peay said.
Programs in the pipeline will look at China 30 years after the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests and the positive and negative impacts of technology on women.
Yalda Hakim, a presenter and journalist with the BBC, told the launch event that the channel aimed “to give a voice to the voiceless” and “to make human rights sexy” in a world where attention spans were shrinking and sound bites ruled.
Broadcasts can be viewed via the netgem.tv interactive platform and will shortly be available via a mobile app.
Programming is in English, but IOHR eventually hopes to broadcast in other languages, including Farsi, Turkish, Arabic and Russian. Reuters
