Spectators to the Spectacle of Law: The Formation of a ‘Validating Public’ at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

Abstract

While the ethnography of contemporary courtrooms has been dominated by a concern with speech, this article considers how a silent, validating public is constructed within court complexes. Drawing on fieldwork at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (Arusha, Tanzania), I explore how the court's threshold practices form validating witnesses whose embodied deference contributes to the constitution of the courtroom as a space of privileged speech. I suggest, therefore, that court spectators are not incidental, but are integral to juridical spectacle and the authority of law.

Keywords:

• International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
• law
• liminoid
• ritualisation
• courtroom

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Nuffield Foundation (SGS/32034) and British Academy (SG-47168) for supporting research conducted under COSTECH (Tanzanian Commission for Science and Technology) Research Permit No. 2006-304-CC-2006-122. Thanks to participants at seminars at the Universities of Sussex, Oxford and the School of Oriental and African Studies and to Simon Coleman, Filippo Osella, Jon Mitchell and the three anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions.

Notes

The working languages of French and English are determined by the Statute of the Tribunal (United Nations 1994d: Art. 31). As the working languages of the United Nations Secretariat they were chosen as the working languages of the ICTY, the statute of which was a basis for the ICTR (see United Nations 1993: Art. 33). In addition, as Rwanda was a Belgian trusteeship 1926–1962 (under the League of Nations and then the United Nations) French was the predominant European language of many Rwandans prior to 1994. Kinyarwanda is the Rwandan language.

http://www.unictr.org/tabid/68/default.aspx

http://www.unictr.org/tabid/165/default.aspx

Built by the Chinese government in the 1970s, the AICC was established as a conference centre and as the headquarters of the EAC which was established in 1967, collapsed in 1977 and was re-established (again with the AICC as its headquarters) in 1999.