Raise Your Hand Against Smacking! Raising Awareness on Children’s Rights through Popularization

This study is part of an ongoing investigation on the verbal and non-verbal strategies present in the Council of Europe’s (COE) campaigns for the protection of human rights. In the COE, citizen empowerment is becoming fundamental in order to raise awareness on human rights issues, so the institution has generated, in addition to legal documents, a variety of information materials and provided information in a form that can be easily understood by those who are not legal specialists. Following the tradition of Critical Discourse Analysis and Social Semiotics, we will try to investigate the discursive practices and strategies across a range of different genres trying to identify the recurrent features employed in order to disseminate information on human rights in a friendly language. Thus, a pragmatic comparison between source legal texts and target texts will allow to identify the linguistic and visual elements used to simplify source genres in order to communicate legal discourse on human rights to the European layman. The analysis will be conducted on a corpus collected from the Council of Europe’s website. It includes different text types – booklets, brochures, videoclips, and more – which belong to the most significant campaigns run from 2006 to 2010. In addition, by bringing to light the intertextual and interdiscursive elements which come out of the comparative linguistic and semiotic investigation, this study explores how human rights are recontextualised in different media and across genres through the interaction and combination of different modes in order to verify whether the transfer from legal language to popularising texts involves any contamination in discursive practices, thus leading to the birth of new text-types.