Danielle Celermajer

Australian Memory and the Apology to the Stolen Generations of Indigenous People

The transformation of global politics in the early 1990s marked the end of the ‘short twentieth century’ (Hobsbawm 1994) and its Cold War certainties. If the collapse of the Soviet Union, end of apartheid in South Africa and fall of Latin America dictators indicated the victorious extension of the international liberal order, the outbreak of genocidal ethnic conflict in Rwanda, Yugoslavia and the Caucasus also heralded the return of integral nationalism. These events marked a new temporality and resultant new type of politics (Olick 2007). Because socialist hopes of a post-nationalist horizon had been dashed, grievances were now framed in terms of ethnic and national histories, which some observers interpreted as a regressive political imaginary of identity politics that divided peoples and occluded the persistence of structural oppression and inequality (Rolph-Trouillot 2000, 171–86; Torpey 2006). In particular, the plethora of official apologies, truth commissions and reparations payments for ‘historical injustice’ suggested a preoccupation with the past rather than the future.1 Certainly, there is no doubting the transnational extent of apologies by governments, heads of state, professional and commercial groups, religious organizations and spiritual leaders to exploited individuals and abused communities, living and dead (Celermajer 2009; Nobles 2008; Torpey 2002; Cunningham 1999, 285–93). Consider the following sample.

Preventing Torture in Nepal: A Public Health and Human Rights Intervention

In this article we address torture in military and police organizations as a public health and human rights challenge that needs to be addressed through multiple levels of intervention. While most mental health approaches focus on treating the harmful effects of such violence on individuals and communities, the goal of the project described here was to develop a primary prevention strategy at the institutional level to prevent torture from occurring in the first place. Such an approach requires understanding and altering the conditions that cause and sustain “atrocity producing situations” (Lifton 2000, 2004). Given the persistence of torture across the world and its profound health consequences, this is an increasingly important issue in global health and human rights.

The State of Free Speech

This article surveys the regulation of speech under the government of Prime Minister Howard so as to clarify the understandings of free speech that have been operant and to extrapolate from this debate to consider broader shifts in political forms. It reviews and contrasts liberal and republican conceptions of free speech and argues that what suffered most is the critical role free speech plays in ensuring popular sovereignty. It links this shift in the location of sovereignty with the changing role of the state in the context of globalisation and the demands from economic actors to remove impediments posed by certain forms of civic activism. Using this case, it theorises the apparently contradictory emergence of neoliberal and neoconservative trends, arguing that both undermine active citizenship.

Acute and Everyday Violence in Sri Lanka

ABSTRACT Police torture in Sri Lanka has been subject to extensive investigation and condemnation but remains a widespread and seemingly entrenched practice. Seeking to understand the resistance of such practices to existing interventions, this article locates the police’s use of torture within a broader geography of social violence in Sri Lanka. We discuss the findings of extensive fieldwork conducted in the north-west of Sri Lanka where we examined not only police behaviour and interactions between police and the broader community but also the social dynamics relationships more generally. One significant finding was that violence against certain types of people, including police use of torture against such people, is generally accepted, even as the police are broadly criticised in the community for their unethical and ineffective behaviour. Another significant finding was that the society is riven with social hierarchies and that patterns of domination are embedded in social, political and symbolic systems. We conclude that police torture needs to be understood against the background of broader cultural practices whereby social subjects are disciplined and policed to produce appropriate citizens and punish social boundary violations.

A disability aware approach to torture prevention? Australian OPCAT ratification and improved protections for people with disability

ABSTRACT In 2017, Australia ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (OPCAT). Ratification of OPCAT presents as a unique opportunity to highlight the institutional treatment of people with disability in a range of sites of detention within Australia and build on advancing international protections for people with disability, including those articulated in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). This article considers the opportunity presented by OPCAT for improving protections for people with disability against torture and ill-treatment. The article argues for an expansive definition of ‘sites of detention’ that is able to encapsulate both disability-specific and mainstream settings in which people with disability may be deprived of their liberty, as well as to address specific practices such as the use of mechanical restraint, chemical restraint and seclusion. Based on an analysis of international National Preventive Mechanism (NPM) models, it is further argued that people with disability, their representative bodies and other civil society actors must be meaningfully involved in NPM processes, including in the monitoring of sites of detention, and the identification of systemic issues affecting people with disability with lived experience of detention.

The ritualization of human rights education and training: The fallacy of the potency of knowing

ABSTRACT Human rights education and training have become one of the principal pillars of the international human rights movement. Based on a comprehensive survey of training resources and approaches developed for police internationally, this article concludes that they principally follow a dry information transmission model using a traditional lecture-style pedagogy. Looking across the large body of training material available internationally, it appears that there is a fixed body of resource material that circulates and gets recycled, the regularity of its employment rather than its quality now bequeathing it the title best practice. Human rights training has taken on a ritualistic quality. Rather than simply assuming that such ritualism is indicative of mindlessness or cynicism, however, this article treats it as a point of curiosity. It asks: How is it that a template of action has developed and is continuing to expand, with the support of a range of stakeholders when it evidently falls short on key dimensions? Why continue to repeat a performance that seems so ill conceived? The article proposes eight explanations for the persistence of ritualized practices in human rights training for police.

The field of power of transnational law and the new democratic deficit

ABSTRACT In the last 30 years, human rights advocates have brought suits for violations of human and environmental rights throughout the world, and against non-state actors under Alien Torts Statute, a piece of US legislation interpreted as providing jurisdiction over such cases. Finding themselves defending against suits before this statute, multinational corporations have increasingly sought a narrowing of its jurisdiction, culminating in this questions coming before the US Supreme Court in 2012. This paper interrogates how three states, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Germany, positioned themselves in this dispute, thereby examining the complex field of legitimacy and power involved in the development of the field of international human rights. In determining their position, states afforded multinational corporations privileged influence, while accountability to civil society groups was absent. The case illustrates the paradoxical situation where the paired discourses of transnational law and democratic legitimacy persist in authorising states as uniquely legitimate actors in the transnational human rights arena, obscuring the actual field of power. Multinational corporations borrow states’ authority to shape human rights laws, even as they deploy the same fiction to avoid being directly subject to their normative regulation.

From Mea Culpa to Nostra Culpa: A Reparative Apology from the Catholic Church?

In 2013, filmmaker Alex Gibney released Mea Maxima Culpa, a film documenting the case of sexual abuse of deaf children in a Catholic residential school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and, perhaps more importantly, the alleged involvement of members of the Church hierarchy right up to the Vatican in the prolonged protection of priests who committed abuse. When, just a few days after the release of the film, Pope Benedict XVI made the unprecedented move of resigning, Gibney suggested that the resignation was ‘inextricably linked to the sexual abuse crisis’.1 His conjecture may or may not have been true, but the tide of evidence and disquiet about the history of sexual abuse in the Church is without doubt precipitating a demand for a far more comprehensive response than has been seen.

HEBRAIC DIMENSIONS OF HANNAH ARENDT'S THOUGHT

Although increasingly recognized as one of the most important and original political thinkers of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt has not been associated with Hebraic traditions of thought. Indeed, while Arendt explicitly acknowledged the profound impact on the direction and substance of her thought of her experience as a Jew under Nazism, her vehement rejection of onto-theology led her to distance herself from the Hebrew God as a point of orientation for thought and politics alike. Nevertheless, if one attends to the substance of Arendts ideas, rather than to the explicit reference points she provides by way of intellectual heritage, or even to her own statements about the role of God or Hebraic thought, one finds strong Hebraic resonances. This paper explores some of the dimensions of her thought where one can discern such connections, in particular, her ideas about hope, faith and natality and their relationship with a particular conception of time and her thoughts about the importance of promises and the dialogical path to truth in human affairs. It shows how they bear a strong resemblance to key approaches to ontology, law and epistemology in Judaism. It also asks how we might explain these resonances in the absence of an explicit genealogy and probes the significance of those resonances for contemporary ideas about the place of religion in contemporary thinking and politics.

Hannah Arendt: Athens or Perhaps Jerusalem?

As a political thinker nurtured in early 20th-century German, Hannah Arendt is most often identified with the Greek philosophical tradition. This article argues that the crisis in reality that threw her into politics also, though unacknowledgedly, threw her into ‘Jewish modes of thinking’ as an alternative source where she found the Greek tradition lacking. This claim is controversial, given Arendt’s vehement criticisms of any recourse to the absolute, or metaphysical truths in the realm of politics. Nevertheless, and consistent with a number of early 20th-century Jewish thinkers (Rosenzweig, Levinas, Buber, Shestov) who explicitly identified the Hebrew God not as the metaphysical but as the condition of possibility for authentic freedom under conditions of finitude, one finds in Arendt a move towards an understanding of the seat of human freedom that sits far more comfortably in the Jerusalem than in the Athens tradition. Specifically, in her emphasis on natality and genuine futurity, one senses a strong resonance with the notion of pure creation in the Hebrew Bible, as one does, notably, in her insistence that forgiveness and promises (covenants) form the two pillars for human sociality. Throughout the history of Jewish thought, one consistently finds precisely this Arendtian struggle to represent a model of law that holds the tension between binding fidelity to promises, memory and the past, and an openness to futurity, to the infinity of interpretation that gives meaning to those promises. Closely resembling the midrashic tradition, Arendt’s political community of speech is one in which meaning is open ended and plural, allowing for the binding together that sustains a polity, while also opening up to the radically new of each new birth.