Exploring the discourse of the press about the defense of human rights in the rescue of the ship Aquarius

Abstract

This article offers a critical discursive analysis of a sample of news items published in Spain about the rescue and the subsequent arrival of the ship Aquarius to the port of Valencia. The corpus consists of all the news items published in the electronic version of the Spanish newspapers, El Pais, ABC, El Mundo and La Vanguardia from June 10 to July 10, 2018. As a framework of analysis, the methodology of critical discourse analysis will be used to deconstruct the discourse around human rights that arises around the rescue and arrival in Spain of the ship Aquarius and the ships Orione and Dattilo. The analysis reveals that politicians and members of NGOs offer a welcome speech to immigrants based on the defense of human rights, but it is an ephemeral speech that lasts only a few weeks.