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Killed because she is a woman – so what? Law´s (lacking) response to femicides
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- The Gendered-Nature of Criminal Law Defences: An African Historical Perspective
- Gender Equality and the IPC: The Judicial Response
- Feminist Turning Point of Nepal
- 11. OCCUPATION THE DAY AFTER: PROTEST, PREFIGURATION, REPRESENTATION
- Panel 1: Constitutionalism beyond Representation
- Negri beyond Negri: Constituting the Constituent Process
- Reconceptualising representation: Schmitt and Derrida
- Panel 2: Subjective Politics After the Occupation
- Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: Thinking after Squares and Parks or from Pubs and Working Men’s Clubs
- Under the Sight of Justice
- Panel 3: (Dis)order and (In)justice in Atmospheres of Protest
- Atmotechnics: Policing Crowds in Occupation
Killed because she is a woman – so what? Law´s (lacking) response to femicides Marjo Rantala, University of Helsinki This paper discusses the conceptualization of intimate partner femicides, that is, intimate partner homicides with female victims and male perpetrators. The term of femicides is used to explore different approaches of (criminal) law to gender, as femicides manifest one of the most extreme forms of structural gender hierarchy and oppression of women. An international systematic review published in 2013, studying an overall number of nearly 500.000 homicides, concluded that if a woman dies as a victim of a homicide, she has most probably been killed by her former or current partner. The probability was highest in high income countries.7 On the other hand, since the 1990s, both the UN human rights treaty bodies and the European Court of Human Rights have been developing doctrine of due diligence with regard to violence against women. States have been found liable for sex discrimination in cases where public authorities have not made every effort to prevent the killings of women. By the adoption of the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combatting Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (the Istanbul Convention) in 2011, the principle of State responsibility has now been explicitly incorporated into a human rights convention text. Furthermore, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women dedicated her annual thematic report to femicides in 2012, referring to ‘gender-related killings of women’, calling for action. Notwithstanding, somewhat surprisingly, intimate partner femicides have not been vastly studied by legal scholars nor specifically addressed by European institutions when measuring and assessing gender equality and human rights. It is asked, how Europe is responding to address femicides. How the gendered nature of domestic violence in general, and of intimate partner homicides in particular, is and should be addressed in law? The Gendered-Nature of Criminal Law Defences: An African Historical Perspective Caroline Smart, University of the Western Cape - carolineannwilson1968@gmail.com Legal systems made and compiled by men are draconian in that it continuously refuse to appreciate the reality of the lives of women who are driven by fear or despair to kill their abusive spouses in non-confrontational killings. Domestic abuse is in itself is gendered natured. The power of men who abuse women and the effects of the abuse disappear in the face of apparently neutrally applied legal rules because the embodied gender is rendered invisible. Hence, the actions of women who kill in non-confrontational situations are considered as vengeance and unreasonable. Their actions are categorised as either bad or mad and the criminal law defences, not grafted with the female in mind has shown itself unwilling to excuse or exonerate their behaviour. They are judged by an inappropriate male yardstick. When relying upon these draconian criminal law defences they do so with little or virtually no success. These defences are currently applied and understood in the context of masculine social norms and do not speak the language of women. In order to fully engage with, and critique the historical exclusion of women’s perspective from criminal law defences, this study considers the origins of existing conventional defences available to abused women and evaluates the existing gender bias within these defences. This study is expected to suggest that these draconian criminal law defences cannot be adapted to accommodate women, not to afford abused women “a licence to kill”, but attempt to develop an alternative legal framework in which the values and norms recognises abused women’s reactions as reasonable in the light of the African abused woman’s social context. Gender Equality and the IPC: The Judicial Response Sanskriti Singh, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur - sanskritisngh6@gmail.com Women in India are discriminated from the very inception of birth through female infanticide. Even before birth, female feticide and sex selective abortion, battering during pregnancy, coerced pregnancy etc are very common in a country like India. But in recent times, it has been argued by many that certain provisions of Indian Penal Code are gender bias in nature and it has left a lot of scope for misuse. The law of Adultery has been challenged on the ground that it is discriminatory and unconstitutional. Woman who involves herself in an adulterous relationship either through consent or active involvement should not be left out from the arena of the law. It is also argued that the way Sec-498A has been formulated has left a lot of loopholes for exploitation and abuse. According to me, Adultery should not be dealt under the Penal Law any more. Rather, civil remedies should be made available against the offence of adultery. It is already dealt as a ground for divorce. Along with that, the spouse involved in the act should be made liable to pay heavy compensation. Similarly, the provision relating to Cruelty should be amended so as to put a heavy fine upon the wife who brings false allegations against her husband and in-laws. If the section is amended in such a manner that the offence is made bailable, then it would not stop the abuse of the law. Women who are in actual need of protection under this provision shall be deprived from justice. In a country like India, there exists a probable fear that the police officials might get easily manipulated and frame the case in a way so as to make it bailable. However, the section can be made compoundable so that there exists a chance of conciliation. Feminist Turning Point of Nepal Renuka Devi Sitaula, Norvic International Hospital Kathmandu - adrenu@yahoo.com It is the age of empowerment of women and the promotion of gender equality in all sectors of society. It has been included in the Constitution of Nepal 1992 and more comprehensively in the recently promulgated constitution of 2015 .There are also further provisions like the inclusion of women up to 35 percent as candidates for the periodic election . The results of the new Constitution can be describe as the election of the women president Miss Bidhya Bhandari , The Chairman of the house of representatives Miss Onsari Gharti Magar and Miss Susila Karki as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Nepal . 11. OCCUPATION & THE DAY AFTER: PROTEST, PREFIGURATION, REPRESENTATION Stream organisers: Simon Thorpe (Warwick) and Illan rua Wall (Warwick) The stream calls for papers which address questions raised by the recent occupations of squares and parks. From Puerto del Sol to Syntagma Square to Zucotti Park and far beyond, each occupation presented a polyphonic platform, always pulled taut, and occasionally torn apart by the multiplicity of politics, strategies and demands at play. Can we usefully typologise the plural politics of the square, or does it defy identification? Tensions have been said to exist in binary, e.g. horizontality/verticality, autonomy/hegemony, anti-representation/alter-representation; as well as in ternary, e.g. anti-power/constituent power/counter-hegemonic power, or anarchism/communism/socialism. Do these contrasting frameworks antagonise or complement each other? Or are they false oppositions, obscuring too much common ground? The prefigurative turn in radical political strategy seems to infuse all of them in different ways, but is that to stretch prefiguration to breaking point? Perhaps the plural politics expressed in the squares is a new fact of multitudinous political life, or perhaps politics is still a matter of choosing and consolidating, building chains of equivalence allowing a different type of representation. In either case the constitution of radical politics raises a crucial point of negotiation: what form of constitutionalism is prefigurative politics prefiguring, or is it rightfully anti-constitutional? The return of the party then, under the shadow of the square, seems to determine new trajectories while also further confusing political distinctions. Prefigurative organising folds into state populism, institutionalising itself while subverting its own institutionalisation, constituting itself while exceeding the bounds of constitutionalism. In the days after the occupation – in the parties, the citizens’ platforms, the municipal governments and the extant local assemblies – what is left, and what is to come? Panel 1: Constitutionalism beyond Representation Chair: Illan Wall Anarchism and Republicanism Ruth Kinna, Loughborough - R.E.Kinna@lboro.ac.uk Alex Prichard, Exeter - A.Prichard@exeter.ac.uk
Simon Thorpe, University of Warwick - simongareththorpe@googlemail.com Antonio Negri describes constituent power as the permanent crisis of constitutionalism, which should be kept open and made unlimited in a prefigurative process of infinite becoming. It is a revolutionary moment that must be continued and, in an apparent paradox, governed and institutionalised through an ongoing constituent process. But what is a constituent process? More specifically, how can an infinite process of becoming and insurrection be constituted? Is not institution the enemy of insurrection? Is not constitution the enemy of becoming? Negri’s writing is infamously abstruse and ambiguous, making the answer to this question far from obvious. Yet the questions he asks are crucial to contemporary radical social movements, and thus so too are the respective answers. Therefore, this paper will first present an analysis of Negri’s writing that systematises the primary concrete constitutional principles that would constitute a Negrian constituent process, under two core meta-principles: anti-representational direct democracy, and the constitution of becoming. Through analysing the theoretical difficulties presented by the latter, I will argue that, to ape the title of Negri’s book on Marx’s Grundrisse, a Negrian constituent process requires a theory of power beyond the reductive binary of constituent versus constituted power: it requires a Negri beyond Negri. Reconceptualising representation: Schmitt and Derrida Jacques de Ville, University of the Western Cape, South Africa -jdeville@uwc.ac.za Political representation, a consequence of the modern state, is today said to be in crisis, specifically the representation offered by mainstream political parties. Representative state institutions in general are likewise under scrutiny. Commentators point in this regard to the low turnout for many elections, the declining membership of political parties, the general distrust in politicians, and the declining interest in mainstream politics. Those who participate in recently formed movements no longer want to be ‘represented’, but to directly act themselves. The calls for an end to representation have been explained with reference to the perception of a by-and-large decadent and self-serving political class, the accompanying resistance to being represented by this class, as well as the effects of neo-liberalism. The latter has led to gross inequality and concentrations of wealth, and is characterised by a suspiciously close relationship between political representation and capitalist interests. Because of ‘globalisation’, structural changes are furthermore taking place in the nature of modern society, specifically a movement away from fixed collective identities towards a more complex mix of (non-)identities as well as towards individualisation (see Simon Tormey The End of Representative Politics (Polity 2015)). Schmitt’s reflections on representation and identity in texts such as Constitutional Theory (1928) and Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923), although written in a different context and with different concerns in mind, can be read as offering at least a partial response, more specifically a conceptual response, to the present ‘crisis’ of political representation. In Constitutional Theory Schmitt contends that the identity of a people is dependent on representation so that there is no real possibility of escape. Different from what is sometimes contended, Schmitt fully appreciates the lack of purity and inevitable interrelatedness of these two principles as manifested in every state form. The paper will point to a reconceptualisation as well as a certain radicalisation by Schmitt of the notion of representation in Roman Catholicism. Representation for Schmitt does not simply reproduce, but enhances, and does not draw its strength in this regard from the represented, but from what Derrida refers to as the un-representable. The implications of this reconceptualisation of representation for constituent power as well as for constituted powers will be explored in the paper. Panel 2: Subjective Politics After the Occupation Chair: Simon Thorpe Experimenting, nothing but experimenting: mapping the (im)possibilities of political ruptures. Leticia da Costa Paes, Birkbeck College, University of London, Law and Humanities Department - lpaes01@mail.bbk.ac.uk 2013 was a year of intense protests in Brazil: thousands of people occupied the streets, questioning the political system, general living conditions and the repressive policies carried out by the local and federal governments. Besides the police violence, the streets were continuously and intensively occupied by popular forces and popular meetings. In October 2014 general elections were held. The hope was that all the protests and claims for rights that rocked Brazil could be reflected and resonated during the elections. It did, but for the worse. The results of the elections have formed the most conservative and sexist Parliament composition post-dictatorship. In 2015 and 2016 the streets were occupied by a crowd composed predominantly by white people and the middle class demanding the impeachment of the President, Dilma. In a completely different scenario from the demonstrations of 2013, this time no claims for rights were brought. Unfortunately, 367 congress legislators voted for the impeachment proceedings against Dilma. In May, Brazil awoke to a new interim President, who immediately changed the government composition, ignoring all the diversity of Brazilian society. Considering the context, quickly described, it is easy to realize the movement that goes from intense resistance and occupations to a current scenario in which the social conflict is captured and the city is vacated of political dimension. We can find similar experiences around the world, considering the particularities of each locality and historical context. My main purpose is to investigate the conditions, if any, for a political rupture at a time when the production of subjectivity constitutes the most fundamental of capitalist concerns. Are the occupations sufficient to change our political subjectivity? How might we produce our subjectivity differently? What are we capable of becoming? What can rights do in the face of such contexts? My intention is not to give a correct answer to these questions but rather to provoke reflections and highlight these concerns within legal and social studies, taking a critical perspective. I am mainly interested in the relations between law and politics, considering the political context in which we find ourselves. The purpose is also to explore the practices and theories that renounce every political discourse that insists in maintaining the current values of the status quo. Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: Thinking after Squares and Parks or from Pubs and Working Men’s Clubs? Jayan Nayar, School of Law, University of Warwick - R.J.Nayar@warwick.ac.uk The ‘(non-)working classes’: this amorphous, generalised collectivity of disobedience – in all their democratic glory or their bigoted stupidity, depending on your point of view – emerged as the critical determinant of the Brexit referendum. And yet ‘they’ seldom find mention in critical theory, save in some generalised allusion to precarity, to exclusion, to bare life, the point of departure from which to think. I am intrigued by this apparent dual presence and absence of this recalcitrant configuration of the constituted; they serve thought, yet appear seldom within it; they provide the apparent rationale for progressive imaginations of ‘prefigurative’ politics but appear to have resoundingly turned against such aspirations. And so my question: as critical theory contemplates the extra-ordinary event ‘prefigured’ as it were by the ‘Occupation’ of parks and squares, streets and critical theory conferences, how do we account for the so-thought-of ‘uncounted’ when ‘they’ assert their (inconvenient, perhaps unacceptable) disobedience of being in the world, thought out of the theoretically abandoned, economically decimated, socially sneered at locales of pubs, working men’s clubs, job centres, football terraces etc? I wonder if in the efforts towards so much ‘prefigurative becomings’, we critical thinkers have unoccupied, abandoned, ignored the many configured places of the materiality of being. To recover, and to re-member socialities of being otherwise than the (abandoned-)atomised-aspirational-consumer-subject, to reclaim futures from impossibility, therefore, less perhaps the reification of evental occupations and more a necessary return and reoccupation of precisely the messy worlds of inconvenient and unpalatable ordinariness wherein lies the hard matter of social transformation. Under the Sight of Justice Ceylan Begüm YILDIZ, School of Law (PhD), Birkbeck College, University of London -ceylanbegumyildiz@gmail.com Berkin Elvan was struck down by police canisters during the 2013 uprising, known as the Gezi uprising, in Turkey. Elvan died after being in a coma for 269 days. Although an investigation has been undertaken for more than two years, the case has not been brought to the courts yet. The Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front, an armed leftist organisation which is recognised as a terrorist organisation by the Turkish state, laid claim to the legacy of Berkin Elvan. In May 2015, Party-Front members held hostage the prosecutor in charge of Berkin Elvan’s case in a courthouse in Istanbul. They asked for Elvan's murderer's names to be released publicly in order to prosecute them in people’s courts which would be established by them, or else they would kill – or in their words 'punish' – the prosecutor, and die fighting. While the negotiations were still taking place, Special Forces undertook an operation which ended in death. The Party-Front members were executed. While the ending of their bare lives counted as neither murder nor sacrifice, the prosecutor was named a martyr. In this paper, I focus on the crises of representation, justice and rule of law through unpacking the imagery presented by opposing parties. Among weapons to carry out the action, the Party-Front members smuggled in their flag and a poster of Berkin Elvan which served as a background image to the video statement in which their demands were listed while pointing a gun to the prosecutor’s head. Some days later, a funeral ceremony took place in the same courthouse. The prosecutor’s coffin, wrapped in a Turkish flag, was placed in between two gigantic Themis statues inside the courthouse. Through these contesting images, this paper will analyse the sovereign’s monopoly on law and justice. Then, I will explore the Party-Front’s counter claim of justice. Finally, through drawing on the works of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, I will discuss the interplay between two opposing justice claims. Panel 3: (Dis)order and (In)justice in Atmospheres of Protest Chair: Andreas Kotsakis The Long Range Acoustic Device and the Jurisprudence of Sonic Violence James Parker, Melbourne Law School - parker@unimelb.edu.au The Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), its manufacturers claim, is a ‘high-intensity directional acoustic hailer designed for long-range communication and issuing powerful warning tones’. Its detractors, by contrast, call it a weapon: a ‘sonic canon’ perfectly capable of causing permanent hearing damage in seconds if you find yourself sufficiently close. The device was first developed in the US at the turn of the century in the wake of the attacks on the USS Cole and the fall of the twin towers. Today it is used by military and police forces in cities around the world as a mode of embodying and projecting sovereign authority and, in some instances, enacting sonic violence. LRADs can be found today everywhere from the streets of Baghdad and Kabul, to Brisbane and London. In 2014, they were used to disperse protestors in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police shooting of Michael Brown, and again by the NYPD following the killing of Eric Garner later that year. A lawsuit has been filed by five protestors present that day. This is not the first time the device has found itself in court. How should we understand the LRAD as a matter of jurisprudence? And how does its use affect the practice and atmospherics of protest? This paper argues that the LRAD not only came into being by and through law, it has introduced new forms of both legal and acoustic relations, some of which are, politically speaking, deeply sinister. The LRAD is important in its own right therefore. But it also serves as a model for thinking through some of the ways in which, together, law and sound are mutually implicated in the production and destruction of contemporary life. Atmotechnics: Policing Crowds in Occupation Illan rua Wall, School of Law, University of Warwick - I.R.Wall@warwick.ac.uk At the Battle of Orgreave, before wading into the assembled miners the police began to rhythmically beat their truncheons against their shields. The sound was intense and menacing. Subsequent accounts describe it as a valorising action, generating an atmospheric bubble where the police became aware of their collective strength as a single unified entity. The paper investigates the use of atmospheres by police in response to crowds, developing the term ‘atmo-technics’ to describe the attempts to produce collective affect. In so doing, the colonial nature of such tactics becomes evident. Directory: law law -> Law in American Society Black History Month Essay Contest law -> A brand New Image? Should Personality Rights be law -> Jurisdiction of the Courts law -> Luther V. Borden: a taney Court Mystery Solved law -> ‘Intellectual Property Rights in Sport’ law -> The law of tort introduction a. What is a Tort? law -> Law of Delict Chapter 1: General Introduction law -> Appendix C: Federal and Minnesota Case Law Summaries Download 0.92 Mb. Share with your friends:
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