Week Seven
Greetings from a rainy (and much cooler) Prague! With the temperature dropping here, it is feeling less like summer and more like a wet spring day, but I am not complaining. This break in the heat has had me smiling all week.
Things are quiet in the office this week, as it coincides with a national holiday in the Czech Republic and a time when many in this country travel to the countryside. Prague is still busy overall, but I've noticed a change in the amount of people during rush hour and the general sense of busyness. It appears many have taken advantage of the time to leave the urban life behind, at least for a short period, not unlike the week of July 4th holidays in the U.S., when many flee to a lake or river to spend the weekend on the water, or to the mountains for hiking or some other outdoors activity. The American thirst for the frontier of the outdoors is palpable and rooted in our particular history. I have learned, since being here, that the Czechs have an equally strong desire to hike, bike, swim, and engage in all things outdoors-related, particularly since 70% of the population owns a home in the country, or rural area of the country, as a weekend spot for escaping the city centers. (Don't quote me on this statistic, as I haven't found any source to verify it against; but it's the one that I have heard the most since being in the Czech Republic.) This number sounds, of course, extraordinarily high to my ears, but I have also learned that the Czech penchant for fleeing the city for the country, making their own place in the outdoors, is also rooted in their particular history. The story I have heard repeated is that because the Communist regime was so repressive, silencing its citizens from multiple forms of expression, Czechs developed ways to build both inner and outer lives that could not be disrupted or silenced further. They also found ways to escape the control of the government, and country homes, even if only visited on the weekends, were one way to do so.
I suppose this small historical/cultural detail is small in the grand scheme of things one can learn in the course of 10 weeks, but it is a piece of the puzzle that has been slowly assembling to create a bigger picture that I will carry with me when I leave. One of the things I have reflected on the most in the last week, particularly since I am still processing the discussions and conversations I heard during CEELI's Annual Meeting, is how subtle yet corrosive repression and silence can be. The most alarming stories I have heard from the lawyers, judges, human rights activists, and citizens I have met at various CEELI events and gatherings have not been those of enormously egregious offenses (although those are also alarming). They have been the stories of the small changes, the turning points when a government official begins to lie, or a group becomes targeted out of nowhere. They are the small changes that rapidly grow into the much larger offenses that close in on people's ability to move, speak, write, work, and reside without fear.
On the topic of silence, I have been thinking a lot about how lack of transparency links with the inability to tell stories of what happened in their totality. And for me, these themes always link back to whether a society or a group of people can move forward or heal from great tragedy and trauma. One of the most fascinating conversations I have overheard in the CEELI dining room was a conversation between two one-time refugees from Russia. One was a man who grew up in Moscow but came to the U.S. as an adolescent, and the other was a woman from Siberia, who has spent most of her adult life working for human rights organizations in England. At the prompting of questions from a Turkish journalist, both began to share their story. The man, who is a lawyer, began telling an extraordinary story about uncovering the truth of his family's past--that his grandfather had been part of Stalin's regime and as a judge, forced to sentence hundreds to the death camps. While the family story itself was remarkable, the ensuing conversation with the woman originally from Siberia was even more fascinating, as the two commiserated about how ordinary Russians have these kinds of stories, but many of them have remained silent for so long that they do not have a venue to tell their stories, much less know where to begin or what to tell. Even more, the history of the last century, including the last few decades, remains shrouded in silence and mystery for many ordinary Russians, so they are still thwarted from knowing the truth about what happened in their own families, cities, towns, and country.
On the same theme, only a few days later, I met a woman who is originally from Burma but currently lives in Prague. We talked extensively about her work in Burma, helping to unearth stories of injustice under the military regime, and she spoke about the toll that decades of silence has taken on both the victims and the perpetrators. She then shared about her involvement in a project being conducted here in the Czech Republic, called Memory of Nations, and initiated by many groups, including Czech Public Radio. The project attempts to collect and document stories of survivors of the Nazi and Communist regimes, and once again, the theme is emerging from decades, even a century of silence.
Of course, none of this talk of silence and storytelling is too tangential from the law. Part of the reason I'm reflecting on these particular conversations is that my work for most of the week has been on a grant proposal, as well as writing several statements of fact for a few European Court of Human Rights cases that will be used in some of the CEELI trainings. The proposal is for a project that will draw explicit links between storytelling, as done by journalists, and law enforcement officials, investigators, and prosecutors. In countries where trust has eroded between these parties, CEELI's focus is on creating connections and allowing these practitioners to cross the divide and learn more about one another's work, especially given there is massive potential for a symbiotic relationship. After all, if done well and ethically, these professional groups depend on the truth. Journalists are often at the front lines of uncovering corruption or criminal activity that might lead to further investigation and prosecution. And when and where legal mechanisms fail or simply do not exist, journalists can often take an investigation beyond the work that law enforcement does, to tell a story to a wider audience and expose the truth outside a courtroom. There is much for both of these professional communities to learn from one another, especially in terms of methodology and process, but I am also seeing how--on a social/structural level--these two groups work together from their different roles and capacities to encourage transparency and healthy airing of the truth, in pursuit of justice.
In my work on the statements of fact, it was interesting to dig into the timelines for various torture cases. In large part, by the time the cases arise to the level of the European Court of Human Rights, the government or prosecutor's office is being held accountable for failing to prosecute the officials who have committed the acts of torture. The telltale sign of a violation, in case after case, was when, in the face of expert testimony or clear evidence, a judge, prosecutor, or investigator chose to ignore the signs of torture and execute a judgment that obfuscated the story of the detainee, recording in their official statements that there were no signs of injury or that the detainee had come to the police department of their own volition or that the detainee had confessed willingly. The story would remain intact, other than a few omissions, and the officials who had used physical coercion or violence remained in power. Again, it is striking how subtle and small these obfuscations can appear at the beginning, almost nothing more than a strike of a line from the record. But behind them are hours or even days of abuse, beatings, and other illegal activity. As a mechanism of international law, the European Court of Human Rights may be flawed, but it is interesting to see how it can be a pathway for some to have the whole truth revealed concerning their case, especially when they have been met with silence and silencing at every other turn.