Media induces 'compassion fatigue' over Africa

Human Rights Conference: Journalists have put people off Africa with a never-ending diet of misery that fails to reflect the complexity of life on the continent, a weekend conference on human rights has heard.

Award-winning BBC journalist Fergal Keane said the growing obsession of the media with the trivial and celebrity news was further helping to induce "compassion fatigue" among the public.

The media had reported famine in Africa, but had failed to reflect the ingenuity and dignity of the people on that continent, he told the Department of Foreign Affairs's annual human rights conference.

Mr Keane said he had noticed that the people who were interested in human rights were increasingly "getting on in years" while the younger generation was absent. Journalists and the political class were failing to engage younger people; trying to do so should be at the top of society's priorities.

After the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the world had said "never again," he pointed out, yet the same global indifference was evident in the response to Darfur. Since the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent conflict there, countries with the logistical power to intervene in situations like Darfur "don't want to know".

UN assistant high commissioner for refugees Erika Feller told the conference that the world was experiencing an era of asylum fatigue where the rights of refugees and asylum-seekers were no longer guaranteed.

Refugees were frequently mischaracterised as criminals, terrorists or at best illegal immigrants, and their needs for human rights protection were treated as secondary. The problems attributed to refugees and asylum-seekers had become deeply mired in broader issues such as terrorism and transnational crime.

She pointed to major gaps in human rights protection, especially for 25 million internally displaced people in the world, and nine to 11 million stateless people who are trapped in a legal and human rights void.

Minister of State for development co-operation Conor Lenihan said the new UN human rights council must confront the reality of human rights abuses. While theoretical debates about the issue were important, Ireland was more interested in the practical side of human rights which had an impact on the ground.

"We would be doing a grave disservice to all the victims of such violations and those who struggle to end them, if we remained silent in the face of the many human rights abuses that continue to plague the world today."

Mr Lenihan said Ireland, as "a First World country with a Third World memory", had a unique role to play in international human rights. The White Paper on overseas aid would be published in late September, he told the conference.