A return to basics

This paper presents a challenging and radical contribution to the debate about media laws and politics in Kenya. The internationalist universalist dimension is critical and eye-opening. It is a lampoonery of the dichotomised 'them' against 'us' axis upon which the discourse on media legislation reforms revolves. Instead, the author recommends that the debaters should embrace an important trilogy: the state, the media and the citizen. This, the author argues, will help in removing the debate away from the infrastructure of a free media as the only bone of contention, to include the 'spirit" of the media laws. The interest of the argument, therefore is to create a people-centered and responsive media. The people are integral stakeholders in the media industry, and as is, it is argued, must be as protected by the constitution as the media rights. The foregoing premise logically lends itself to the conclusion that media rights are human rights. If so then the author insist that the debate about media reforms is ill-informed if it doesn't include constitutional reform. But he goes past this to embrace a universalistic approach to the review of media laws. This is consistent with the paradigm shift in the development and application of the modern human rights laws and international politics, which started with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Genocide Convention (1948), the Geneva Convention of 1949, the Convention of Refugees (1951), the International Government on Civil and Political Rights (1966) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966). Within these internationally binding legal instruments, the author says, the media can find supportive articles for their demand for the inclusion of media rights as human rights. In this new internationalist thinking, the nationalistic or territorial approach to human rights issues have been found to be wanting as concerned governments have repeatedly violated national laws with impunity. There is no guarantee that national media laws will not be derogated by the despotic regimes again. Having traced the origins of the universalisation of human rights to the wartime atrocities of Nazi regime, the paper contends that the media today is an important international diplomatic player in conflict prevention, management and resolution to be left at the mercy of the draconian whims of an authoritarian government. The author declares that freedom of expression is the first freedom. Therefore it ought not to be negotiable. The paper laments mistreatment of the Kenyan journalists and their institutions by the powers that be.