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Excess deaths, insufficient vocabulary
Europe is now in its third record-breaking heatwave since May. A rapid analysis published this week by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Imperial College London, and the Met Office estimates that the May and June heatwaves alone killed more than 2,700 people in England and Wales – around 42% of them attributable to human-caused climate change. Across western Europe, the EuroMOMO mortality network recorded over 10,000 “excess deaths” in a single week in late June. None of this should surprise: two years ago, the World Health Organization identified Europe as the fastest-warming of its six regions, with heat claiming an estimated 175,000 lives a year – more than a third of global heat-related deaths.
What is notable is the vocabulary. These 175,000 deaths arrive as “excess mortality estimates” and “heat health alerts”, not as a humanitarian catastrophe. There are no flash appeals, no humanitarian corridors to Essex, no wire copy marvelling at the resilience of plucky locals sheltering in air-conditioned supermarkets. The language is instructive. “Humanitarian crises”, it turns out, only take place in particular geographies. In the bifurcated vocabulary of humanitarianism, wealthy countries inhabit a zone of competence that occasionally experiences accidents, anomalies, and public health challenges; the rest of us are doomed to reside in the zone of crises, the objects of charity and pity. The heatwaves are the test case running in real time: a third of the world’s heat deaths, and not one of them, apparently, humanitarian.
Milestones
Many happy returns to a broken definition
The 1951 Refugee Convention turns 75 on 28 July. When it was adopted, it defined a refugee around a very specific figure: a European, displaced by events in Europe before 1951. Though the geographic and temporal limits were formally lifted in 1967, the template survived. And wherever mass displacement actually occurred, including in Europe itself, regional organisations have had to invent workarounds: the OAU Convention in 1969, because decolonisation-era flight didn’t fit; the Cartagena Declaration in 1984, because Central America’s didn’t either; and the EU’s Temporary Protection Directive, which sat unused for two decades until 2022, when it was activated within days for Ukrainians – a speed never once contemplated for Syrians, Afghans, or Sudanese navigating the same continent’s asylum bureaucracy.
Three separate confessions that the definition doesn’t work, none of them eliciting much media or humanitarian commentary on how to fix it. The narratives still sort the deserving from the undeserving on the Convention’s terms – flight as an individual story of persecution to be proven – when displacement almost never works that way. The New Humanitarian will be examining this anniversary and what 75 years of definitional failure means for refugee narratives in the next Decolonise How? webinar.
Politics of Suffering
Permission to mourn
There is something striking about the coverage of the devastating earthquake in Venezuela. Western media have, rightly, centred the human experience: the search through rubble, the parents waiting for news, the children pulled from collapsed buildings. We have watched a man named Simon Medina dig through a flattened building in La Guaira with a shovel and his bare hands, hoping to find his mother and brother. The coverage asks us, simply, to grieve with Venezuelans as human beings.
It is difficult to watch without recalling Gaza. The same dust-covered children, the same frantic digging through concrete, the same parents carrying lifeless bodies from collapsed buildings. The visual language is hauntingly similar. The journalistic language is not.
It is tempting to explain the discrepancy by saying an earthquake has no author – no government to blame, no diplomatic ally demanding “balance" – and so empathy comes freely. Tempting, but false. The Venezuela story is among the most politically loaded disasters imaginable: Nicolás Maduro sits in a Brooklyn jail cell, US warships are supporting the relief operation in a country Washington was recently treating as an adversary, and the authorities in Caracas block websites even as they appeal for help. Politics is everywhere in the coverage. What it never does is reach the bodies of the dead. No outlet pauses to ask whether the child in La Guaira has earned our mourning.
That is the real distinction: a politics that surrounds suffering, and a politics that contaminates it. When a death is inconvenient to grieve, the victim is quietly reclassified – no longer a person who was killed, but a claim to be adjudicated, weighed against military necessity, hedged with caveats about who is counting. In much of the press, naming the act in Gaza – genocide – is itself treated as controversial, and to grieve for a Palestinian is to be seen as taking a side. No one needs permission to mourn Venezuela.
The contrast should make us uncomfortable. Not because Venezuelans are being humanised – that is precisely what is owed to anyone under the rubble – but because it is a real-time demonstration that newsrooms know how to do this. They have simply chosen not to do it in Gaza.
Focus on Ethics
Balance by proxy
The New Humanitarian’s recent investigation into Israeli demolitions in eastern Gaza is an excellent piece of journalism: painstaking, verifiable, and damning. Which is why one small fragment of it is worth pondering. The report notes that neither the Israeli military nor the Israeli government responded to requests for comment. It then does something curious: it reaches back and reprints the military’s previous justifications – that extensive demolitions are necessary for security, that civilian infrastructure is not targeted, that all actions comply with international law.
Two journalistic conventions are bundled together here, and they deserve to be pulled apart. Seeking comment is accountability journalism, and non-negotiable; the refusal to respond is itself information, and printing it is right. But supplying the absent party’s boilerplate on their behalf is something else.
There is a genuine counterargument. Official statements are evidence – claims of this kind end up quoted in ICJ proceedings – and placing “it does not target civilian infrastructure” directly beside documented demolitions of civilian infrastructure can indict the claim more efficiently than any editorial. But that only works if the reporting actually adjudicates the claim against the evidence, rather than presenting it as ballast for balance. Left unchallenged, repetition is amplification, not context.
So, an open question on ethics: what does the right-of-reply convention owe the reader, and at what point does it become laundering?
Word War I
Clichés that need to die
Over on Substack, Chris Ogunmodede has compiled 10 thought-terminating clichés in African governance discourse that deserve a decent burial – the stock phrases that end analysis at precisely the moment it should begin. It is a bracing read, and it begs an obvious companion exercise. The humanitarian sector has its own graveyard-in-waiting: “complex emergency”, “capacity building”, “in these challenging times”, and “resilience” which, as Ogunmodede himself notes, has become a compliment paid for surviving the politically intolerable. Send us your nominations for the humanitarian clichés that most urgently need retiring, ideally with the sighting that convinced you. We may include the best in a future issue.
Seen crisis coverage that raised your hackles – or warmed your heart? Send it our way: [email protected]