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	International Review of how Media cover Migration by OSCE, UNHCR, EJN, Council of Europe   Dec 2015   Moving Stories - International Review of how Media cover Migration from the Ethical Journalism Network   An international report on media and the global migration and refugee crisis, issued today to coincide with International Migrants Day (December 18), says journalists often fail to tell the full story and routinely fall into propaganda traps laid by politicians.   The report, Moving Stories, is published by the Ethical Journalism Network and reviews media coverage of migration in the European Union and in 14 countries across the globe.   “Around the world media coverage is often politically led with journalists following an agenda dominated by loose language and talk of invasion and swarms,” said Aidan White, EJN Director. “But at other moments the story is laced with humanity, empathy and a focus on the suffering of those involved.”   Missed Opportunities: How journalists and media in Europe failed to raise the alarm about an imminent influx of refugees fleeing war in Syria and Iraq, even though the story was there to be told a year before the crisis broke in 2015;   Hate-Speech: How outrageous anti-migrant or anti-Muslim statements by politicians like Donald Trump in the United States and some European leaders fuelled increasing public concern and hijacked media coverage;   Falling Standards: How media fail to provide detailed and reliable information about the refugee crisis because of a lack of editorial resources or the presence of well-informed journalists able to provide in-depth and sensitive reporting;   Sensationalism: How much journalism is driven by hyperbole, intolerance and distortion with media in confusion over what are the correct terms to use to describe migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers.   To counter these problems, the report recommends that news media take urgent action to appoint specialist reporters to the migration beat. It also calls for industry wide and in-house training on migration issues and problems of hate-speech; improved links with migrant and refugee groups; and more employment of journalists from ethnic minority communities to strengthen diversity in newsrooms.   The report highlights how media coverage, much of it negative and focused on numbers of migrants on the move, took a dramatic turn with the death of Alan Kurdi and the publication of pictures of his body on a beach in Turkey. From that moment journalism woke up to the human tragedy within the migration story.   In his foreword to the report Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, sums up the challenge facing media: “It is not just a lack of humanity on the news agenda or a matter of luck or a matter of caring more about some people at the expense of others,” he says. “We need a broader lens to see what really is going on.”   The lack of a wider perspective often leads media to miss the link between migration and human development. Journalists often ignore the evidence of serious studies that illustrate how migration, despite short-term challenges, is invariably beneficial for economic and cultural development in the longer-term.   The reports states: “There is a tendency, both among many politicians and in sections of the mainstream media, to lump migrants together and present them as a seemingly endless tide of people who will steal jobs, become a burden on the state and ultimately threaten the native way of life. Such reporting is not only wrong; it is also dishonest. Migrants often bring enormous benefits to their adopted countries.”   The report examines media coverage in a diverse range of countries. From Australia, a country built by migrants, where media struggle to apply well-meaning codes of journalistic practice within a toxic political climate to Nepal and the Gambia which are exporters of labour. In these countries censorship or a lack of resources - or a combination of both - are mainly to blame for poor coverage.   The reports on migration in China, India and Brazil tell another story. Though large numbers of people migrate from each of these countries, the main focus is on internal migration, a global phenomenon often ignored by mainstream media that involves millions and dwarfs international migration numbers. The biggest movement of people in history has taken place in China over the last 35 years.   In Africa while headlines focus on people leaving the continent and heading north, there is also migration between countries, with many people from the impoverished central regions heading for South Africa – a country where media also deal with problems of xenophobia and governmental pressure.   In Europe, where migration and refugee issues have shaken the tree of European unity, media struggle to provide balanced coverage when political leaders respond with a mix of bigotry and panic – some announcing they will only take in Christian migrants while others plan to establish walls and razor wire fences.   The report looks at Bulgaria where media have allowed sensationalism to dominate migration reporting and Italy, where hate-speech is counterbalanced by a purpose-built ethical charter for media. In Britain the report notes how the story is often told without a sense of scale or balance with extensive reporting on the plight of people at a small refugee camp in Calais.   In Turkey, seen by many European politicians as a key country in stemming the onward rush of migrants, most media are under the thumb of a government that punishes dissident journalists, so public debate is limited. In Lebanon where millions of refugees from war-torn Syria are based the story is not helped by confused mixing of fact and opinion by many media.   In the United States the controversial Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump has made migration an explosive topic. Media time has focused on heated and often racist exchanges which obscures some fine journalism that provides much-needed context. South of the border, media in Mexico suffer from undue political pressure and self-censorship.   “The refugee crisis is not going to go away,” says White “and there has never been a greater need for useful and reliable intelligence on the complexities of migration. But if that is to happen, as this report shows, we must strengthen the craft of journalism.”   http://ethicaljournalismnetwork.org/en/contents/moving-stories-international-review-of-how-media-cover-migration http://blogs.afp.com/correspondent/?post/The-refugee-crisis%2C-through-AFP-journalists-eyes http://www.irinnews.org/report/102337/how-150-000-people-were-saved-in-the-mediterranean http://newirin.irinnews.org/neglected-migration-crises-listicle http://newirin.irinnews.org/global-refugee-crisis http://www.fmreview.org/destination-europe/bundy http://fra.europa.eu/en/theme/asylum-migration-borders http://www.mercycorps.org/photoessays/syria-afghanistan/meet-some-youngest-refugees-fleeing-europe http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03lbkl1   21 Dec 2015   Hungary urged to refrain from policies and practices that promote intolerance   The UN Refugee Agency, the Council of Europe and ODHIR – the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights have urged Hungary to refrain from policies and practices that promote intolerance, fear and fuel xenophobia against refugees and migrants.   The Organizations have joined voices to call on the Hungarian leadership to adopt the true spirit of humanity in helping those who have been forced out of their countries against their own will and choice and are currently seeking safety in Europe.   The Hungarian Government launched a new public campaign in December, portraying those fleeing war and conflict as criminals, invaders and terrorists based on their religious beliefs and places of origin. Not the first of its kind in the country, this campaign also targets migrants and plans to run for two months through Christmas and into the new year in 2016.   The Organizations are collectively stressing the need for the Hungarian Government to acknowledge that refugees are coming to Europe, after having endured trauma, tragedy and loss while searching for hope and dignity to start a new life far from the upheavals of war and conflict. As part of the common European system, Hungary is looked upon to contribute to the joint efforts in dealing with the continent’s largest refugee crisis since the World War II and to meet its international legal commitments in this area under both International law and the European Convention on Human Rights.   Nils Muižnieks, the EU Commissioner for Human Rights for the Council of Europe calls on Polish President not to sign new Media Law.   I call on the President of the Republic of Poland not to sign the law on Public Service Media governance and to uphold the independence of Poland’s public service television and radio.   The law worryingly places public service media under direct government control by giving the latter the powers to appoint and dismiss the members of the supervisory and management boards of public service television and radio.   These arrangements contradict Council of Europe standards which notably require that public service media remain independent of political or economic interference.   Rushed through Parliament, the law has also not benefited from the public debate which is required in a democratic society when considering such important changes in the field of media freedom.   http://www.osce.org/odihr/211951 http://www.coe.int/en/web/portal/-/council-of-europe-and-unhcr-urge-hungary-to-change-tone-over-refugees http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=17048&LangID=E
	Why the Paris COP21 Agreement could make Disaster Inevitable by Thomas Pogge Yale Global Justice Program, agencies   January 2016   We are sitting in a car going 35 miles per hour. It’s a nice day and the road is straight. But the map tells us that we are approaching a densely populated area where we know we’ll have to slow down to 20 mph, maybe less. There are no other roads we might turn onto; we are stuck with the one we’re on.   Our car is a bit unusual. It’s an automatic, no clutch or gears. It also has no brakes. And it has a strange time delay in the gas pedal so that any fuel we put to work by pressing the pedal reaches the engine gradually, spread out over the next five minutes. How hard the engine is working depends on how far, on average, the gas pedal has been pressed over the five preceding minutes.   Our chauffeur has been driving cautiously at first, pressing the pedal only slightly. But he’s become more assertive recently, pressing the accelerator farther down toward the floor. Most of the acceleration this will cause has not yet occurred.   Some of the passengers are getting restive. The densely populated area is now in sight, and it looks like it’s a bit below where we are, so the road ahead seems to be going downhill. We can also see from the speedometer that the car is gaining speed: 37 – 38 – 39 – 40, in ever more rapid succession. We are worried about the lack of brakes and worried about all the fuel that will still reach the engine over the next five minutes. At our speed, five minutes means more than 3 miles. Do we really want to drive in a densely populated area at 45 or 50 mph without brakes?   For a few painful minutes, the driver ignores the increasingly urgent appeals from the back seat and keeps depressing the accelerator farther. But now we finally have his attention, and he actually turns down the radio to tell us that he fully shares our concerns. Good! He has a great idea, too: let’s all vote to agree that our speed in the densely populated area shall be no more than 15 miles per hour. We are much relieved; and everyone happily votes for the proposal. But the driver’s foot stays where it is, pressing the accelerator halfway to the floor. And the speed has reached 40 now – no, make that 41. A bottle of champagne is circulating to celebrate our unanimous agreement.   The agreement concluding the recent COP21 in Paris could be the turning point toward saving the world from a climate disaster. But it could also breed the complacency that will make this disaster inevitable. The agreement as such solves nothing. The hard work lies ahead.   The great positive about the agreement is the shared realization that we must keep the average global surface temperature of our planet from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level. The great problem is that there was no agreement on any division of responsibilities toward achieving this task. However much states may emit in the future, none of them will be violating the Paris agreement.   How much heat from the sun our planet absorbs depends on how much greenhouse gas is in the atmosphere. The most important greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), has already increased by 50%, from 270 to over 400 parts per million, and this increase has already raised the average global surface temperature by 1 degree. Even if humanity were to emit no more greenhouse gases at all, the elevated level would continue to heat our planet beyond the 1.5 degree target.   But then of course we will emit more greenhouse gases. In fact, global annual emissions may continue to increase even if – improbably – all states were fully to keep their voluntary pledges (their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions or INDCs) toward averting a climate disaster. It seems inevitable now that atmospheric carbon dioxide will break above 450 parts per million, thus substantially increasing the extra heat our planet will absorb from the sun. One cannot banish a danger simply by agreeing that it won’t materialize.   But governments can mollify the world’s citizens with such agreements. This propaganda trick has worked before. At the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome, governments agreed to halve hunger, for instance, without agreeing on any specific efforts or division of responsibilities. When the number of undernourished people rose, they repeatedly diluted the promise (in the Millennium Declaration and again in the first Millennium Development Goal). And then, when they were still way off-track in 2012, they revised their method for counting the hungry so as to greatly raise the historical baseline and greatly lower the current count.   Last September governments adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, promising by 2030 to “end poverty in all its forms everywhere.” This sort of agreement benefits present power holders by producing public appreciation: the widespread feeling that they have solved the poverty problem. The agreement will put some pressure on future power holders, who will predictably resort to creative interpretations of those pledges and to creative accounting gimmicks. We can expect the same to happen with the INDCs.   At worst, the COP21 agreement may produce consent and complacency, allowing governments to postpone hard choices until the climate disaster is inevitable. At best, this agreement may inspire action toward formulating and implementing a common plan for averting this disaster. To achieve the latter outcome, citizens must keep up the pressure and insist on a determinate division of responsibilities that will definitely suffice to accomplish the task.   Here it will help to remind governments that they do have legal duties in regard to the climate, even if they failed in Paris to impose such duties on themselves. By continuing with their present emissions and thereby causing ever-increasing climate harms, governments would be violating important legal duties arising from existing human rights law, international law, tort law, private law and environmental law.   The Oslo Principles with associated legal commentary constitute a sustained effort to articulate what these existing legal duties require from governments. Courts have already enforced these legal duties: in the Urgenda case in the Netherlands, the Leghari case in Pakistan and the Foster case in Washington State, for example. Other cases are pending in Norway, Belgium, the United Kingdom and elsewhere.   We can still save our beautiful planet. To do so, we must follow up the Paris agreement with fundamental reforms of our global economy in the very near future. Getting governments to implement these reforms against much corporate resistance requires a substantial citizen mobilization around the globe. Resist the temptation to relax after Paris. We can’t save this world without your active engagement.   * Thomas Pogge is Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University.   http://www.socialeurope.eu/2016/01/why-the-paris-cop21-agreement-could-make-disaster-inevitable/ http://globaljustice.macmillan.yale.edu/news/oslo-principles-global-climate-change-obligations Visit the related web page
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