17 Respect Words… That’s it: respect words

sally March 26, 2018

Donie Tarrant talks to Noeline Blackwell, a human rights lawyer who is Chief Executive of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre. She was formerly the Director General of the Free Legal Advice Centre (FLAC), and before that, was the principal of a solicitor’s practice in Dublin. Noeline sits on the Citizens Information Board, the board of the Immigrant Council of Ireland and on the board of Front Line Defenders. She has previously been a member of the boards of the International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) and Amnesty International, Ireland.

Noeline talks about the importance of respecting words, the legislation around hate speech in Ireland and where to go from there against the context of migration to and from Ireland and how society has evolved in this new multicultural reality.

More on the project:

Amid a troubling global context – the dehumanisation of migration policy, a decline in sensitive to human life and human rights, a rise in Islamophobic and xenophobic speech, the commercialisation of journalism – more than 150 European radio outlets and nearly 1,300 journalists from the eight RESPECT WORDS partner countries represented by IPI (Austria), Radio Dreyeckland (Germany), ERT (Greece), Civil Radio (Hungary), Near FM (Ireland), Radio Popolare (Italy), Radio Student (Slovenia) and the project coordinator EMARTv (Spain) have joined together to help strengthen media coverage of migrants and minorities, an indispensable tool in the fight against hate speech.

Under the theme “Ethical Journalism against Hate Speech”, the RESPECT WORDS project focuses on the need to rethink the way in which media outlets and journalists cover issues related to migration and ethnic and religious minorities. As part of the project, each partner is producing a series of 20 programmes exploring how media deals with migration and minorities in each partner country.