Safeguarding human dignity in the European audiovisual sector

Audiovisual media services fall within the scope of many different
international and national legal instruments, as well as of best practices
and standards developed by case law. These rules often target a much wider
spectrum of activities. Only some of them address specifically the media.
Those, however, that don’t are not necessarily of lesser importance
for the audiovisual sector. The case in point might be human dignity,
a "Human Right" with great bearing on the media. Reversing the logic,
one might point out that the media may impact heavily on human dignity.
While the concept of another Human Right, namely the right to information
and freedom of expression has been a topic for IRIS publications, we have
hitherto published much less information on human dignity. One explanation
might be that its essence is even harder to grasp than that of the right to
information and freedom of expression. To remedy this situation, this IRIS
plus looks into the legal roots and main elements of human dignity as an
important standard for audiovisual media services.