Gap Between Death and Discourse
An entirely uninteresting conversation:
I raised the topic of Pinochet’s recent house arrest with my boyfriend on Monday evening. Courtesy of the BBC, I told him that although Pinochet has legal immunity, he can be tried on a case-by-case basis. The crimes that warrant his arrest are 36 kidnappings, one murder, and 23 cases of torture. It’s frustrating, I began, that a man known for his policy of brutal repression, responsible for the murder and disappearance of more than 3000 people, can only be found guilty after an infinitely extended process, one at a time. He scoffed at this, well what do you want, that Pinochet be charged on one big account of injustice in general?
And its relevance to the course:
The exacting nature of law and its lengthy processes wasn’t my point. It was about the gap between abuse and death and the discourse that puts it in a rational context. I was thinking about the pain of those who suffer without recompense, waiting for papers to go through and details to be established. When a perpetrator stands in court, the evidence of culpability debated at length, they must think, what stands in the way of his prosecution when what we endured was so clearly under his jurisdiction? Society would go to hell without formalities and procedure, true, but cases like these are still frustrating.
How do you translate the messy human aspects of crime into the agents of legal concepts? It feels obscene and ridiculous to read a detailed account of torture and say yes, the human rights of this person are being abused, to speak in this way about something that negates language. But you need a framework. I guess that’s the point of this course – to study human rights discourse, then witness its abuse in various documents and sometimes visceral accounts, and try to reconcile the two. Pinochet will be going in and out of courts until he deteriorates.
Source:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6100066.stm
tag: last301
I raised the topic of Pinochet’s recent house arrest with my boyfriend on Monday evening. Courtesy of the BBC, I told him that although Pinochet has legal immunity, he can be tried on a case-by-case basis. The crimes that warrant his arrest are 36 kidnappings, one murder, and 23 cases of torture. It’s frustrating, I began, that a man known for his policy of brutal repression, responsible for the murder and disappearance of more than 3000 people, can only be found guilty after an infinitely extended process, one at a time. He scoffed at this, well what do you want, that Pinochet be charged on one big account of injustice in general?
And its relevance to the course:
The exacting nature of law and its lengthy processes wasn’t my point. It was about the gap between abuse and death and the discourse that puts it in a rational context. I was thinking about the pain of those who suffer without recompense, waiting for papers to go through and details to be established. When a perpetrator stands in court, the evidence of culpability debated at length, they must think, what stands in the way of his prosecution when what we endured was so clearly under his jurisdiction? Society would go to hell without formalities and procedure, true, but cases like these are still frustrating.
How do you translate the messy human aspects of crime into the agents of legal concepts? It feels obscene and ridiculous to read a detailed account of torture and say yes, the human rights of this person are being abused, to speak in this way about something that negates language. But you need a framework. I guess that’s the point of this course – to study human rights discourse, then witness its abuse in various documents and sometimes visceral accounts, and try to reconcile the two. Pinochet will be going in and out of courts until he deteriorates.
Source:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6100066.stm
tag: last301
posted by Serena at 6:03 PM
2 Comments:
Yes, to both of you. I especially like the succinctness of Peggy's formulation: "how to make the concrete abstract and then concrete again."
I think there's also more to think about human rights as discourse or as representation, which I hope we'll get to this week. (I'm trying to think through it right now.)
But this issue of the relation between concrete and abstract, and perhaps therefore of making abuse visible, and so then punishable, seems to me very important.
I agree with everything you all have said. It makes me think deeper into the evolution of human rights and I am often curious about the development of them but more so the transformation of crime to punishment. How does somebody justify that a punishment is equivalent or even suitable for the crime that has been committed? In the case of Pinochet and as Peggy said, translating troture and death into human rights abuses, who makes the decision on what is suitable for Pinochet to suffer for the horrors that he committed? Is that even physically possible? No punishment can replace the x-amount of people disappeared or tortured at the time. And now because it hasd taken so long to uncover anything, Pinochet is too old and feeble to really be held accountable for anything that he did. I guess the real question is then, how do we translate actions into defined issues and abuses and have abusers be accountable for them in a timely manner in which they can then actually be held accountable? I guess then we're back to square one and the question of who now decides which punishment is suitable for the actions one has committed? Its a vicious cycle people!
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