Annual Lecture Brings Journalistic Approach to Human Rights Advocacy

Kira Kay, Executive Director of the Bureau for International Reporting (BIR), delivered the Center for Human Rights and International Justice’s 2025 Annual Lecture on International Justice on May 20, titled “Journalism’s Role in International Justice: Notes from the Field.” The event was co-sponsored by Stanford Immigration and Human Rights Law Association and was hosted at Stanford Law School. Kay’s lecture focused on her journalistic approach to human rights advocacy.

Kay created BIR in 2007 after noticing a gap in public domain reporting on overlooked topics and regions. In her role as a journalist and Executive Director of BIR, Kay strives “to take these really rather difficult sometimes nuanced complex stories and try to make them understandable for a public audience in her words, as well as to explain how these justice processes work, the crimes they are adjudicating, and what victims get out of the process.  Kay highlighted the importance of telling the human stories of vulnerable populations as well as the need for journalists to hone the abilities of asking open questions and speaking to sensitive populations with care. She also emphasized that journalism can support justice processes by going where others cannot, questioning leaders on their action or inaction, hearing directly from victims in the field, collecting evidence, and building cross-regional expertise in a way that cross-references experiences. 

Providing insight into her video journalism, Kay shared four segments that illustrated distinct approaches to international justice mechanisms at work in the world today. She first highlighted 2007 reporting from northern Uganda that demonstrated tension between calls for social harmony and punitive justice as members of the Lord’s Resistance Army were being tried at the International Criminal Court. Kay used this example to stress the importance of carefully selecting which voices to include in this style of journalism and the value of viewing victims themselves as experts on the issue at hand. 

Next, she shared reporting on the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, which tried the Khmer Rouge’s top officials in a hybrid tribunal located in Phnom Penh. This video emphasized victim frustration that only individuals at the top echelons of the brutal regime were being tried, not the ordinary people they had to confront daily in their home communities. Third, Kay shared a story she is currently developing focused on Argentina, where domestic pressures are putting memory, truth, and justice initiatives at risk. Despite Argentina’s long history of success in transitional justice, this experience illustrates that political changes can jeopardize mechanisms for societal healing and reckoning. Finally, Kay shared footage from a 2022 visit to Myanmar, which featured a group called Myanmar Witness, which documents and verifies attacks against Rohingya Muslims using open source intelligence in the hopes that one day they can use these records to bring justice to victims. 

Collectively, these four examples highlighted the key considerations of journalists in the human rights field and challenges to international justice around the world.

Following her lecture, Kay responded to audience questions about the experience of ethically engaging survivors of human rights abuse, the future of long-form journalism, how to make editors care about “underdog” conflicts, and modes of ensuring the safety of journalists, subjects, and all involved in the videography process. 

“We were honored and thrilled to be able to host Kira Kay for this year’s Annual Lecture,” remarked Associate Director, Penelope Van Tuyl. “It’s important to us as a program to be able to connect our students to practitioners engaged with human rights work across a range of sectors. The thoughtfully curated body of journalistic work Kira shared was perfectly suited to this purpose.”