Implication Of Human Rights

Human rights are generally moral rights claimed by everyone and held against everyone, especially against those who run social institutions (Orend, 2002:37). With the advent of the United Nations (UN) and the subsequent adoption of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, the concept of human rights has turned out to be one of the most contemporary issues across the globe. The UN Charter, which was adopted in 1945, was the first international document to recognize the protection and promotion of human rights as an obligation to be carried out by individual, as well as collective states (Langley, 1999). The main reason behind the adoption of the charter was, according to Smith (2007) to forestall the reoccurrence of the horrible

Unfortunately, states, according to Hakemulder et al (1998), are often the very abuser of the rights of the citizens they are required to protect. However, it should be noted that though the state bears the primary responsibility in issues of human rights, other organs of the society, such as corporations (Addo, 1999) are included in the protection of human rights. Although there are international human rights instruments which the UN has produced to serve as common standard of achievement for all people, countless human rights violations occur across the globe. These violations could be committed by non-state actors through direct involvement or indirectly when they consent to such violations. Non-state actors such as individuals, groups, informal or organised, ad hoc or continuous, may pose as violators, protectors or intermediaries. Consequently, it is imperative that they be examined so that they could be held accountable for these violations. It is also important to ascertain the reasons for state inability to safeguard human rights (Arat,

These organisations monitor violations of human rights, lobby for reform and feed the press with information on the subject. The many humanitarian crises in the last decade have also caused media organisations to increase their coverage of human rights. Some of the most serious human rights violations have either taken place in the context of armed conflict, or have been the immediate cause of conflict erupting. One effect of this has been to muddy a distinction between human rights and humanitarian issues that was already none too clear in the minds of many journalists. Yet the impact of these crises in pushing human rights into the foreground has been indisputable, above all those crises in the former Yugoslavia and Central Africa. Though journalists have expanded coverage of human rights issues into new areas, many human rights issues are under-reported. Issues that are less visible, or slow processes, are covered rarely. Human rights are still taken largely to mean political and civil rights, and the importance of economic, social and cultural rights is ignored widely by the media in their coverage of economic issues, including the international economy, poverty, inequity and social and economic