CFOM’s Sara Torsner has been awarded an Economic Social Research Council (ESRC) grant for the project Profiling impunity for human rights violations against journalists: A systematic account of state-based harm and practices of resistance.
The project will run for 2 years and aims to build a framework to better understand the underlying causes of impunity and countermeasures being used to combat the problem in different country contexts.
Impunity – or the lack of accountability – for attacks on journalists is a widespread and global problem. Currently almost 80% of journalist murders go unpunished. Particularly at risk of attacks with impunity are journalists covering critical public interest issues including political and corporate corruption, organised crime, human rights violations and environmental conflicts.
This lack of accountability has been shown to engender a climate of fear and self-censorship among journalists, sometimes as the only means of self-protection when states fail to deter or are directly complicit in attacks on journalists.
In view of this cycle of injustice, the ESRC-funded research project will develop an original conceptual, methodological and interdisciplinary approach – combining social and computer science – to support in-depth comparative assessment of impunity and countermeasures used across diverse country settings.
The project will use Participatory Action Research to bring together a global group of civil society, journalistic and legal actors in a global Community of Practice that will develop more effective strategies for addressing impunity and protecting journalists and their work.
For more information, please contact Project Lead Sara Torsner (s.torsner@sheffield.ac.uk)