ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the intersection of human rights, media and political discourse. It provides an overview of the politics of rights as they emerged and as they relate to communication, representations of human rights issues in media and the impact on political discourse as a result of the increasing pervasiveness of rights. Drawing on critical rights scholarship, the chapter analyses the limitations of rights discourse in addressing political problems, in particular the focus on civil and political rights characteristic of globally dominant approaches to human rights. Human rights are commonly classified into three 'generations' or 'tiers'. The best known are the 'first generation' civil and political (CP) rights, which arose during eighteenth century, and the 'second generation' social, economic and cultural (SEC) rights, which emerged during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The third is a set of group-oriented rights such as right to self-determination, right to development, and right to peaceful coexistence, which arose during late twentieth century.
