Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how human rights court professionals and NGO advocacy officers maintain trust in the state when faced with evidence of state violence at European borders. Based on both cases, the paper argues to expand the notion of legal consciousness within the anthropology of the state.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on how human rights court professionals and NGO advocacy officers maintain trust in the state when faced with evidence of state violence at European borders. The paper’s focus contributes an analysis of the bureaucratic apparatus of a human rights court and the political assumptions of a human rights advocacy strategy to the panel’s discussion of evidence. Approaching evidence through the lens of human rights litigation and advocacy, the paper asks how professionals maintain trust in the state when faced with evidence of border guards not always acting ‘state-like.’ To answer this question, the paper reflexively draws on involvement in two action research projects : one as a research consultant for a human rights NGO in a Southern European border state, the other as a member of a collective of civil society organizations, lawyers and researchers in the Cyprus-Lebanon-Syria pushback corridor. After setting out the institutional context for human rights litigation and advocacy against border violence, the paper first discusses how court professionals in Strasbourg draw on bureaucratic procedures in order to maintain trust both in and of member states of the Council of Europe. Second, the paper illustrates how human rights advocacy officers in Brussels draw on belief systems about the primordiality of international law for local bureaucratic practices in order to maintain trust in and of member state of the European Union. Drawing on both cases, the paper makes a case for expanding the notion of legal consciousness within the anthropology of the state.