Severing Relation: Haitian ‘Criminal Deportees,’ Torture, and the Spatialized Ethics of Removal
**This event is open to those of the Stanford community ONLY**
❗️There will also be lunch with the speaker on the same day prior to the colloquium @12:30pm in room 51A❗️
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, a peculiar strand of jurisprudence developed concerning what protections the United States government owed to Haitian citizens who had been removed to Haiti after being convicted of crimes in the United States. At issue was the Convention Against Torture, or CAT for short, a treaty that prevented the U.S. government from expelling individuals to a country where they would more likely than not face torture. Starting in the late 1990s, Haitian deportees who had been convicted of crimes in the United States and served their sentences in U.S. prisons were indefinitely detained in Haiti upon their return, where they faced some of the worst conditions of confinement in the world. What were U.S. courts to do? What did they owe these individuals soon to be juridically severed from the U.S. body politic? To what extent were they bound to protect them from the extreme forms of suffering they would face after being delivered directly into the hands of their future jailers in Haiti? As we enter a new era in which the United States actively seeks out third countries to receive and indefinitely imprison the subjects it expels through its growing deportation machine, it is worth looking at this jurisprudence through an anthropological lens that views the law as expressive and world-constituting, as opposed to a mere reflection of placeless principle. Doing so forces us to ask how law embodies our ethical commitments, how it creates ethical geographies of relation, and how its juridified modes of severing relation establish the boundaries of complicity in state-sanctioned violence.
