Of Trauma, Testimony, and the Power of Human Rights Voices

Record any evidence of privacy violation and become a witness. For twenty-six years I've been suffering from high stress, anxiety, insomnia and depression, but now all the world is demanding justice. I've been victim of so many evils in the last three decades, the last evil i was a victims was the loss of the custody of my son. I've been raising him since he was a little baby with four months and now he is eight years old. This persecution has to end, all the world is demanding this. My political right respected in this next election and my right to reparartions for so many violoations.  And besides all the violations there is also the systematic bullying on TV against vulnerable human rights defenders, justice must be demanded urgently. This campaign of dehumanization has to stop and justice to begin.  I have a YouTube channel, here is the link.   https://www.youtube.com/@lucianofietto4773/videos. Since the creation of this channel its visualization counter doesn't work, the same has been happening with the counter of this blog since its creation in 2010.

This post is a summary of an article with the title above published in 2021 at   https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/of-trauma-testimony-and-the-power-of-human-rights-voices/

For the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, the "perfect crime" does not consist in killing the victim or the witness, as he explains in his most important work "The Different," "but rather in obtaining the silence of the witness, the deafness of the judges, and the inconsistency (insanity) of the testimony." Indeed, in the context of human rights work, the silence of voice, whether on the part of the victim who can't speak out or on the part of the addresses who does not listen, signals a moral dispute of the first order. Part of the work of human rights activists has thus been to break the silences: to enable trauma survivors to testify, to secure an audience that can bear witness to their experiences, and to find corroborating evidence. Human rights video activism is closely tied to the struggle to assert voice in ways that make a difference. On a basic level, video is a vehicle through which survivors testify, claiming an acoustic voice in its literal dimension. According to Pierre Bairin, the former director at Human Rights Watch, "The people we interview understand the power of video and the importance for them to testify. So we go and ask them to tell us what happened, what went wrong, and they understand that they can make a difference." Trauma needs voice to articulate the suffering and start the healing process; in the form of testimony, that means breaking the silence about the experienced trauma. The ability to testify in front of an audience also give the human rights voices the power to assert personal experience as publicly relevant. Testifying is therefore a political act that indicates agency. Voice also has visual qualities. It renders images meaningful beyond their denotative and connotative appeals. When human rights collectives invoke descriptions of video as a tool that provides a "deeper insight into what the realities are," as activists and witness program coordinator Raja Althaibani tells me, they underscore an understanding of voice as visual. This is what historian and filmmaker Christian Delage refers to when stating about the Nuremberg trials the "audiovisual mediation reflected the true essence of Nuremberg in a way that words could not." The video is capable of capturing the magnitude of a human rights violation in ways that are more readily accessible, even in institutional spaces. Although testimony is part of the methodological toolkit for human rights fact-findings, its relevance surpasses the evidentiary dimension. The centrality of the visual and acoustic voice is implicit in how human rights collectives describe and operationalize video's power in their work. In 2009, the NGO WITNESS coproduced a video with the Centre for Minority Rights Development in Kenya, "Rightful Place: Endorois' Struggle for Justice." The video documents four decades of forced evictions of the Endorois community from their lands. It emphasizes personal testimonies as authentic claims to justice. The interplay of hearing their voices and seeing their faces is thought to help the viewer understand the magnitude of the human rights violation. Voice also helps explain how human rights video works in journalism and the law. For example, when news organizations broadcast the footage provided by Human Rights Watch on Syria's torture centers, they palyed to the acoustic and visual dimensions of voice. For safety reasons, the faces of the torture victims are not shown in "Syria's Torture Centers Revealed" (2012), yet this visual absence is strengthened by the power of testimony. As Carrol Bogert, president of "The Marshall Project," tells me, human rights collectives insist that "the video has to be a story of a person. Instead of the horizontal wide, broad evidence, you need the vertical deep evidence.... It is a weird thing because all day long our researchers are meeting people and hearing their stories, but the way they combine or the way they gather that evidence, they aren't, writing up the whole story." A report highlights the evidentiary scope of a human rights investigation, whereas a video reaches beyond truth-telling by capturing the emotional dimensions and perceived authenticity that undergird the testimonial act that is central for human rights work. Reports can talk about human rights in abstract legal terms, but video, to quote filmmaker Veronica Matushaj, "puts a human face in the human rights atrocity story." As the intervening variable between experience and action, witnessing has long constituted the main operational mechanism in human rights work. Video gains power through the assumptions associated with this tradition. It can document human rights violations as they unfold, it can bear witness to personal testimonies and experiences, and it can reference past trauma in the present. Video can mediate witnessing as an individual experience to other platforms. In doing so, it can strategically transform witnessing into material that is socially relevant and suitable for journalism, the law and political policies advocacy. Witnessing also draws from video's power to facilitate voice in that it designates a particular mode of seeing and feeling whereby seeing can be felt and heard and feeling can be heard and seen. In this way, video can potentially expand the spaces where human rights voices, in their acoustic and visual forms matter. Human rights activism negotiates institutional and professional dynamics with their respective logics to make its voice matter. And voice is the oxygen for human rights.