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* Research Associate, Australian Human Rights Centre, University of New South Wales [
]. This article draws on doctoral research in the field of international law and the media conducted at Cambridge University. It was first developed while the author was the Erik Castrén Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Helsinki in 2008-9. The author would like to thank Susan Marks, Stephen Humphreys, Katie Dyer, the two anonymous referees, the editors of this journal, and friends and colleagues in Sydney, Cambridge, and Helsinki for their feedback and criticism.
The power of the media is a significant dimension of modern life and a much- discussed facet of globalization. Yet the media are little analysed within the discipline of international law.1 This article aims to foreground the relationship of the media and international law through the example of human rights.
So what do we mean by 'the media'? The common use of the term 'media' is noted in the Oxford English Dictionary as referring to the 'main means of mass communication, esp. newspapers, radio, and television, regarded collectively; the reporters, journalists, etc., working for organizations engaged in such communication' and also as referring to 'a particular means of mass communication'.2 Even in this simplest definition there is a sense of the variety of meanings of the term, both singular and plural. Thus I shall use the term to refer broadly to the phenomenon of mass communication, its various forms and processes, the profession of journalism, and the social institution of the mass media. In this article I am especially interested in the news media, given its particular significance for the field of human rights.
In considering the relationship between media and law as a potential field of international law, there are several directions which can be taken.3 We can analyse the regulation of the media at the international level in fields as diverse as human rights, criminal justice, humanitarian law, intellectual property, trade, and telecommunications. This reveals an emerging layer of international regulation of the media, but one which is to a large degree dominated by free expression concerns and a consequently deregulatory emphasis. Important work has begun here in comparative media law and European media...