School of Social and Political Science

Description

Lisa Hajjar will discuss her new book, The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture, with a particular focus on the legal battles over the treatment of people detained at Guantanamo. Those who took up the fight against the government over torture, forced disappearance, protracted incommunicado detention, and invented law-of-war offences for use in the military commissions were lawyers. Hajjar will explain why hundreds of legal professionals—JAGs and attorneys from the toniest corporate law firms, human rights lawyers and solo practitioners, law professors and their students—were galvanized to defend the rule of law that was upended by the torture policy and enlisted in what turned into a war in court. The last front is the 9/11 case; the five defendants were disappeared and tortured by the CIA for years before being transferred to Guantanamo in 2006. That case, which started in 2008 and remains ongoing, is proof that torture and justice are utterly incompatible and Guantanamo's legacy is failure.

Bio 

Lisa Hajjar is a professor and chair of sociology at the University of California – Santa Barbara. Her work focuses mainly on issues relating to law and conflict, including military courts and occupations, torture, targeted killing, war crimes, and human rights. Her publications include Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza (University of California Press, 2005), Torture: A Sociology of Violence and Human Rights (Routledge 2013), and her new book, The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture (University of California Press, 2022). She is a founding co-editor of Jadaliyya and a member of the editorial committee of Middle East Report.

Discussants

Nicola Perugini (PIR) & Kasey McCall-Smith (Law)

Organised by PIR Middle East Series, Global Justice Academy and Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law in collaboration with CeSeR, Social Anthropology, and RACE. ED.