Holding the state responsible: Discourse in human rights reports and (social) media
(2026) Transforming Legal Communication. Cognitive and Multimodal Approaches — ISBN: [9781041144403], accepted/in-press
Files
No attached file found for this publication.
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- In 2019, massive social protests arose in Chile, towards which the state reacted with a strong repression, including human rights violations. These were exposed through detailed accounts in human rights reports. However, the fact that these reports are often written in a specialised language for an expert audience limits their impact on non-specialist audiences. This chapter analyses how these human rights violations are also communicated to the wider audience, by comparing human rights reports (by Amnesty International and the United Nations High Commissioner), with news articles and tweets. This study explores to what extent legal terminology used in the human rights reports also appears on Twitter and in the news articles. It moreover analyses how state agents’ responsibility is linguistically constructed for specific cases of human rights violations, namely eye injuries, perpetrated during the 2019 Chilean social protests. In order to analyse different ways in which the state agents’ responsibility is conceptualised, this chapter looks at how agentivity, interrelated with responsibility, is expressed, relying on discursive, syntactic and semantic aspects. Finally, it also discusses the linguistic representation of other related issues, such as disproportionate use of force and command responsibility.
- Affiliations
Citations
De Cock, B., & Pécher, S. (2026). Holding the state responsible: Discourse in human rights reports and (social) media. In Ruth Breeze, Magdalena Szczyrbak (ed.), Transforming Legal Communication. Cognitive and Multimodal Approaches. Routledge. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/277470