OXFORD: The notorious Rwanda radio station RTLM began to broadcast racism in 1991, and by 1994 was airing instructions to “kill and exterminate” the Tutsi minority. In the same year, a national newspaper, Kangura, printed a large cover picture of a machete with the slogan “What weapons shall we use to conquer the Inyenzi once and for all?”

Accusatory fingers were quickly pointed at the media for their role in the ethnic flashpoints of the early 1990s, but the legal response of the international community was flat-footed. While diplomats fumed and fiddled, and the bravest citizens protested against the media, the UN was unable to intervene. A coherent international approach to the role of the media in ethnic conflict and genocide is yet to emerge.

Or is it? For the first time since the Nuremberg Trials, international criminal justice last week turned to the role of the media. In the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, three journalists were found guilty of direct incitement to cause genocide, and now face life sentences.

While such international justice will be welcomed with a shiver of relief by many, it may worry those who aim to protect freedom of expression in developing countries. According to Helen Darbishire of the UK-based Open Society Institute: “We generally fear that advocating application of hate speech regulations will create an impetus to act without ensuring that any steps taken are in conformity with international standards.”

We might expect that sufficient safeguards are in place if it is the UN tribunal that judges on hate speech, but a more general clampdown on hate speech could constitute an unacceptable curtailment of freedom of expression.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.