Hannah Franzki, Birbeck College London
The fundamental interest of my research lies with the knowledge about history produced in legal proceedings. More specifically, I am interested in how trials that deal with the complicity of corporate actors in systemic human rights violations intervene in societal struggles over the meaning of the recent past by providing a particular reading of the relationship between economic actors/the economic, political elite/the political and human rights violations. Regime changes have constituted prominent moments for hegemonic struggles over the past, as they provide the new regime with the opportunity to legitimise itself through judging the past one. Trials have become a preferred mode of accompanying regime changes as their judgments come with the authority of the legal institution and hence lends legitimacy to the reading of history and political claims that it supports. With the political transitions in the 1980 and 1990 in Latin America and Eastern Europe, the question of how to deal with past injustices was discussed by human rights activist and scholars. It was answered with the idea of transitional justice which holds that emerging democratic societies need to deal with and investigate past human rights abuses in order to stabilise a democratic order.
My argument regarding the transitional justice discourse is twofold. First, it is selective in that it concentrates on the sphere of the political thereby turning a blind eye on the role of economic actors in human rights violations and continuities of economic patterns. Second, that the success of the paradigm is to be understood within the context of neo-liberal globalisation of the 1990s and the parallel championing of liberal, representative democracies as the only legitimate way to organise political communities. Given that among transitional justice measures trials figure prominently, my question is to what extent law has been complicit in shaping the transitional justice discourse in the way just described.