The Legal and Forensic Performance of Truth: The Right to Truth Regarding Migrants' (Enforced) Disappearances
Lead Research Organisation:
Birkbeck, University of London
Department Name: Law
Abstract
This research project seeks to investigate two intrinsically intertwined "modes" of truth production: legal processes and forensic interventions in the context of migrants' disappearances. The right to truth is explicitly addressed in testimonies of victims of enforced disappearances during Latin American dictatorships. However, this right, when attached to the legal recognition of enforced disappearances, has not been extended to disappeared migrants despite the striking similarities of lived experiences of loss and uncertainty in both, post-dictatorship and migration contexts. Truth and reconciliation commissions and courts noticed the interplay of displacement and disappearances. Yet, even after the establishment of the Myrtillini Declaration, which referred to a right to truth for migrants' disappearances, the narrow legal codification of enforced disappearances has frequently led to the exclusion of such cases. First, the research project seeks to trace understandings of temporality and history in legal processes relating to the right to truth, including its perception, mobilization and subversion by migrant communities, activists and humanitarian and legal institutions. The second part of the research explores how dynamic understandings of truth(s), grief and justice and interrelated forms of social control and legal exclusions shape notions of citizenship, legal personhood and political membership.
The central research question interrogates what particular effects legal and forensic practices have on the right to truth (and its inscription of history as facts) mobilized by various actors, including humanitarian organizations, legal and forensic experts and migrant communities themselves. For this purpose, the research will look at three sets of related questions. The first part investigates how material artefacts, such as legal texts, are linked to the perception of temporality and rights. How do such artefacts constitute subjectivity through the interplay of the material object and the subject's affective investment in it? Law, as a "power to form," and juridical practices operate as a generative locus for discrete forms of truth. Laws inscribe and contain temporalities, which material and structural conditions of past violations exceed. The right to truth, in its collective dimension, refers to the construction of a specific entanglement of shared stories and associated imaginaries and myths of (usually national, that are territorially bounded) communities.
Thus, the second stage of the inquiry analyses how the fact that the collective narrative of migrants is deterritorialized and dehistoricized impacts the right to truth. Circumstances of migrants' disappearances appear to be sidelined to an exclusively humanitarian mandate, which shapes postcolonial politics through processes of depoliticization and discourses of compassion. Migrants, crossing borders, are relegated to the margins of their "inalienable" rights - a fact that illustrates the myopia of the legal in the reign of national sovereignty. Hence, the third phase will explore how this national bias and the simultaneous humanitarian administration of migrant disappearances interacts with the right to truth inscribing particular understandings of citizenship, legal personhood, and political membership into the Law
The central research question interrogates what particular effects legal and forensic practices have on the right to truth (and its inscription of history as facts) mobilized by various actors, including humanitarian organizations, legal and forensic experts and migrant communities themselves. For this purpose, the research will look at three sets of related questions. The first part investigates how material artefacts, such as legal texts, are linked to the perception of temporality and rights. How do such artefacts constitute subjectivity through the interplay of the material object and the subject's affective investment in it? Law, as a "power to form," and juridical practices operate as a generative locus for discrete forms of truth. Laws inscribe and contain temporalities, which material and structural conditions of past violations exceed. The right to truth, in its collective dimension, refers to the construction of a specific entanglement of shared stories and associated imaginaries and myths of (usually national, that are territorially bounded) communities.
Thus, the second stage of the inquiry analyses how the fact that the collective narrative of migrants is deterritorialized and dehistoricized impacts the right to truth. Circumstances of migrants' disappearances appear to be sidelined to an exclusively humanitarian mandate, which shapes postcolonial politics through processes of depoliticization and discourses of compassion. Migrants, crossing borders, are relegated to the margins of their "inalienable" rights - a fact that illustrates the myopia of the legal in the reign of national sovereignty. Hence, the third phase will explore how this national bias and the simultaneous humanitarian administration of migrant disappearances interacts with the right to truth inscribing particular understandings of citizenship, legal personhood, and political membership into the Law
People |
ORCID iD |
| Anna Fischer (Student) |