- The Legal Legibility of Genocidal Suffering
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Abstract:
- As the most violent and grievous form of human rights violation, genocide participates in the human rights discourse as an articulation of the most profane and profound experience of human suffering. However, in practice, as a normative legal term which names an atrocious crime for accountability, genocide is considered from a jurisprudential perspective to be empirically concerned with value-free facts of legal violation under international law. Therefore, genocide is at once engaged with the moral and emphatic discourse on the human experience of suffering and the legal discourse on the kind of suffering the law views as legible. Given the empirical impulse of the law to legally align narratives of suffering with categories of human rights violation to punish perpetrators of violence, and the moral imperative of giving voice to survivors of human rights abuse to undo their silencing and guard against collective amnesia, what is the implication of fitting human suffering within the legal category of genocide and what is lost and gained when human suffering is made legally legible? By focusing on witness testimony as a form of legal narrative of suffering that is legible to the law, this paper contextualizes its analysis to international accountability mechanisms for the Rohingya genocide perpetrated by Myanmar to examine how the law choreographs suffering. It argues that the internal tensions exhibited in the creation of narratives of suffering through witness testimony demand the counter-positioning of subjectivity and empirical accuracy, which creates instrumentalised accounts of human rights violation that reinforce regimented taxonomies of suffering in genocide determination processes.
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