No abstract

This special issue examines the diverse realities created by the intersection of emerging technologies, new scientific knowledge, and the human being. It engages with two key questions: how is the human being shaped and constructed in new ways through advances in science and technology? and how might these new ways of imagining the subject shape present and future human rights law and practice? The papers examine a variety of scientific technologies—personalized medicine and organ transplant, mitochondrial DNA replacement, and scaffolds and regenerative medicine—and their implications for our conceptualization of the human subject. Each is then followed by a commentary that both brings to light new dimensions of the original paper and presents a new theoretical take on the topic. Together these papers offer a serious challenge to the vision of the human subject at the root of human rights law. Instead of the autonomous, rational, unique, and physically discrete individual who owns herself and her body, the subject that emerges from the human technology assemblage has physically porous boundaries and a relational self. This depiction of the human being as a relational subject enmeshed in her technoscientific environment requires that we reconceptualize human rights law and practice.

Through an ethnographic reading of an Argentine Supreme Court decision I explore the changing nature of the legal subject of human rights in light of emerging technologies. Guillermo Gabriel Prieto was suspected of being a ‘living disappeared’, one of the estimated 500 infants or young children forcibly abducted by the last military dictatorship in Argentina. They were raised by the perpetrators of the crime or their accomplices and kept unaware of their birth origins. The Court's deliberations focused on Guillermo's appeal of a lower‐court decision to carry out an identity test based on his shed‐DNA. The decision demonstrates that while the subject of human rights has often been equated with the bounded individual, new technologies challenge us to reconsider the subject's core characteristics: physical boundedness, autonomy, and individuality. I argue that the ruling offers us an alternative conception of the subject that could become the foundation for a new vision of human rights

No abstract

In post-authoritarian regimes official judicial proceedings, specifically criminal trials of crimes against humanity, constitute both end-points and intensely desired goals. In the Argentine context, these proceedings are shaped by numerous repetitions. In this paper I explore the process of justice making, the repetitions of testimonies, of legal processes and of historical antecedents, and I query the different ends that these varied repetitions bring into view. Each of the three ends I describe are facets of Argentinian justice making-a desired and sought out goal in the long-aftermath of the last civil-military dictatorship (1976)(1977)(1978)(1979)(1980)(1981)(1982)(1983). But, against what seem to be the key expectations of many in the field of transitional justice, these ends are not finite nor do they bring complete closure. Instead, they may be one version of justice, and perhaps the only one we can expect after many years of impunity.