Thank you so much. Thanks, everyone. And thanks for inviting me to this to this wonderful room to take part in this lecture series.
I first will apologise because I will read a few excerpts from from writing that pertains to this research.
Some of it's already published, but partly because the recording would otherwise be me jumping back and forth
across issues and trying to fill in the explanations and and descriptions as I go.
And that might not be so nice for the listeners,
but also it will help to distil some of the examples of what I think feed into a larger question for me,
which is how to talk about structural racism and institutional forms of racism in
the context of dealing with death in custody cases in Europe at the national level,
but also at a regional level. So in terms of national cases, whether they're criminal cases for civil cases,
but then the human rights cases at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
And I won't talk so specifically about all of the legal ins and outs of these jurisdictions,
but I'd just rather frame the larger question of how to bring a discussion of structural
racism to the to the legal fora of these different courts and of these different cases.
And I'll be talking mainly about these issues through the lens of one particular case that I've been working on,
which is the case of the death of a man named or each other. So I'll describe this case as we go along to.
So first in the talk, I'll discuss race and racism in a general way in Europe.
And of course,
this is going to be a very broad generalisation of what race means in Europe and how it's reflected in in certain laws and European jurisdictions.
So really, really brief. Then I'll turn to a discussion of the Bridgeview case itself and in particular
highlight the ways in which the activists and families that have been working on the
case have tried to bring the discussion of race and racism to the case where there
isn't necessarily an overt use of racialisation on the part of the defendants.
So in this case, the defendant police in his death.
But there is a broader question of race and racism in not only the facts of the case,
but also the way that the case has been dealt with by by the law, including the courts.
And then I'll end by discussing a little bit of what I think would be potential next steps for this case, including going to Strasbourg.
So the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and also what we what we would then think might be some outcomes of that kind of,
you know, that kind of approach. So what does it mean to go to Strasbourg?
What are we asking for when we ask the court to recognise that there's been a violation of human rights and in this case, the right to life?
So Article two of the European Convention on Human Rights.
So first structural racism in Europe. The the European level.
So when I say that, I mean the. The European Union as well as the Council of Europe,
which is the body that's responsible for the European Convention on Human Rights and which
corresponds with the European Court of Human Rights are two different jurisdictions.
So many of you would know that the European Union has the Court of Justice of the European Union,
and they balance concerns that have to do with the four freedoms of the European Union, along with fundamental rights and human rights.
So there's there's one type of analysis that goes on in the European Union level, the other jurisdiction.
So the Court of Justice said, sorry, then.
So the European Court of Human Rights looks at human rights as they pertain just to the European Convention on Human Rights.
So the additional analysis about the free movement of goods, services,
capital and people is not a part of the analysis at the European Court of Human Rights, which generally means that there's a lot more you know,
there's a lot more impetus to go to the European Court of Human Rights with the types of right to life violations that these cases bring up,
because it's really isolating the right to life, as, you know, the main thing that's going to be addressed.
But just to kind of give an overview of what the laws are at the European Union and the Council of Europe levels,
the European Union has jurisdiction over the Member States of the European Union, 28 member states.
Now, primary treaties include the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which has a general non-discrimination provision.
So I'm just trying to emphasise the provisions that have a relationship with the regulation
of race and or the definition of race and the regulation of racial discrimination.
So the main treaty, treaty on the functioning of the European Union has a provision that's a
discrimination provision and includes race in its non-discrimination principle.
The Charter, the European Charter on Fundamental Rights and Freedoms has an article, Article 21,
which is also includes a non-discrimination provision and frames it as a fundamental right.
And then there's secondary legislation. So they are the directives of the European Union.
So the relevant directive is the race directive from 2000,
which is a piece of legislation that articulates what it means to discriminate against another person on the basis of race.
The scope is quite broad, so it applies to employment in goods and services,
it applies to education and those types of public goods, and it provides positive obligations.
For example,
Member States of the European Union have to establish a body that is responsible for for following up with the enforcement of of the rights directive.
And there are similar directives for other protected grounds in terms of equality.
And there are other guidelines and ordinances. So there's a provision in the Common Borders Act that says that immigration and
border control agents in member states shouldn't actually be using race as a way to.
To go about enforcing border control. But, of course, that's been there's a margin of interpretation for states to.
To act and. And many argue including one of the European Union's agencies ECRI the for that agency basically broadly.
On racial discrimination in Europe argues that some countries for example Spain have tended to use quota systems and
targets for certain minority groups and that's been criticised as using ethnicity in the service of border control.
But there are tons of examples where I think these issues at least are relevant ones to raise.
But those are just some of the aspects of the legal framework at the European Union level that exist.
The European Convention on Human Rights, which articulates a list of human rights that exists.
European Union level, which, if you are more familiar with the British law,
is very similar to what's in the Human Rights Act because the Human Rights Act
in the UK was taken more or less from the European Convention on Human Rights.
That has a non-discrimination provision in it as well that names race and proxies for race as grounds upon which people shouldn't be discriminated.
But that convention sorry, that provision, Article 14 of the convention applies only in relationship to human rights of the convention,
which means that you have to first argue that a human right is being violated within the convention other than Article 14,
and then argue that Article 14, the non-discrimination provision is is being engaged there so that your right is being violated.
And furthermore, there's a discriminatory reason for the violation of those rights.
So in the cases that I'm concerned with, it's the right to life is being violated.
And furthermore, there's a discriminatory reason why that right is being violated.
So this discrimination in the violation of Article two rights.
So I'll talk a bit more about that toward the end.
But that's the general legal framework that exists at the European level, then at the national level.
There are different sets of laws and as I mentioned, for both the EU and the Council of Europe,
there are margins of appreciation in terms of how Member States interpret their obligations under the relevant conventions.
So this is an overgeneralisation, I think,
and it's just trying to give a sense of the differences in legal and legal structures at the national level.
The United Kingdom has the Equality Act of 2010, which articulates what racial discrimination means, other forms of discrimination as well.
But racial discrimination is the relevant one here.
It has the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which is supposed to follow up on on issues of discrimination.
How they get there. Germany has the basic the German basic law.
The Court Because that's where the provision that covers racial discrimination.
It also has the general law of equal treatment. So the basic German law is like the constitution.
Whereas the German law of equal treatment is a piece of legislation that resembles in its in, you know, what it, what it means in society.
It resembles something like an equality act.
However, there have only been a handful of cases that have been brought under the German law of equal treatment for racial discrimination.
And part of the reason is that people find it quite difficult to access to access this provision and have it applied in court.
There's also a cap on what people can recover if they sue for racial discrimination.
And there's a two month statute of limitations, which many argue is very short.
But but that might not even be the primary reason that people don't bring claims.
Having done a lot of research,
I personally think it's also because of this understanding that it's going to be difficult to prove the claim in the first place.
And there's not a lot of public discussion on the use of of the of the law.
And there's a national antidiscrimination office and there are also state and
discrimination offices that basically serve to inform people when they think
their rights are being violated and engage with them on a 1 to 1 basis by
appointment and to keep statistics on how many claims are being raised in France.
There is a bit of a different approach to race more generally and in law.
First of all, the French constitutional protections, which did include race as constitutionally named grounds,
has been revised, I think early this year to take race out of the constitutional protections as a category that's covered.
And part of the reason is it relates to the overall approach of France to race, which is to say that if race is basically a false category,
it's a social construct that people are using to harm others, then we are going to criminalise it.
So in in France, race is a criminalised category,
which means that by and large it's a criminal sanction that applies if you sue for racial discrimination.
So an extension of that is removing it as a category from the Constitution symbolically means that it doesn't exist, really.
So we shouldn't be talking about race as a protected category.
So as an outlawed category, a criminally outlawed category, it means that to bring a discrimination claim in France,
you have to apply through the Ministry of Labour if it's against an employer,
to have them file a kind of a criminal suit against the employer, which is a bit more cumbersome,
and it removes the person who's experienced discrimination from the equation.
It also, many argue,
creates a situation where people aren't really going to raise the issue because it's raising it to the Ministry of Labour is like filing a complaint
with an external agency and that the complaints are generally not followed up on in a way that kind of puts the person's story to the forefront.
They might be followed up on with more of an investigation into the policies of the employer.
But since it's a criminal sanction, it's a big deal for the Ministry of Labour to to really aggressively push an issue with an employer.
So for these reasons, it's difficult to to see what the relationship is between having the law structured in
that way and people actually getting discrimination claims through against employers.
And quickly, because these areas are areas that I'm super familiar with in terms of my own research.
The Netherlands has an equal treatment provision in Article one of the Dutch constitution that covers race explicitly,
and there's a Dutch Equal Treatment Act that covers race. And in Spain, the Spanish constitution also covers race in Article 14 of its constitution.
And there's a lot of equal treatment and non-discrimination that exists in in Spain.
So the law is actually, you know, different from France and closer to Germany.
Have races in enumerated ground for bringing lawsuits.
And not to repeat anything.
But there are different ways in which race is thought about socially and politically in these different places,
which has an impact on how they play out in law.
So the United Kingdom race is I don't want to have overstated this,
but used and understood and conceptualised as a social construct, not unproblematic.
But it's it's used in a variety of, of settings from, you know,
keeping statistics on the use of public services in order to decide on funding in kind of census type follow up forms.
So on recruitment and monitoring and the recruitment and monitoring process is kind of an accepted one in the U.K.,
where there are monitoring forms about all different types of difference.
And and that corresponds with some of the expectations under the Equality Act to have at least a sense of what the employers are,
what kinds of what kinds of applicants to certain jobs are getting, maybe treated differently or denied places.
So monitoring serves to foster the ends of greater equality.
So that's the that's the idea of what monitoring is used for.
And the statistics in this case are disaggregated by race in one way or another.
In Germany, the word for. Aces thruster.
And that has a very strong social connotation dealing with the history of of that term, particularly with regard to the Nazi era.
So biological racism and really, you know,
strongly tied linguistically with the idea that this is not a term that has a really strong salience in today's,
you know, in today's politics or today's society.
But that also means that it's controversial within the legal framework.
So there's been a movement to take Bokassa out of the German constitution and to
provide a more descriptive terms of racial discrimination in the constitution instead.
And that has led to, you know,
the counterargument that it's symbolically important to deal with the concept as it exists in society, given all of its problems,
which is led to another counter argument, is that we don't want to trust lawmakers with a very divisive and difficult to manage concept.
But out of all of this come two things, I think.
One is the idea in Germany that race and maybe not all forms of racism, but largely a conceptualisation of racism that insists on a term like race,
is an imported concept that comes from the US type of understanding of race and racial difference and where the law's role is in that.
And the second thing that comes out of it is the reluctance to use statistical data to analyse patterns of racial discrimination.
So statistics are generally kept or disaggregated by race in Germany for a whole variety of things,
like educational performance or educational tracking.
There's a tracking system where people are put into 12, they're put into different educational tracks,
or it's suggested that they follow certain educational tracks or of goods and services or anything like like this.
There are statistics that are kept that that relate to the language spoken at home
and different things that some would argue are proxies for a racial difference.
But not all of those are proxies for racial difference in terms of appearance and in terms of the perception of cultural background, etc.
So there's an issue with data that comes out of that.
I think in France the issue is more acute because as I mentioned in France, race isn't criminalised category.
So data is also strictly forbidden in most settings.
So the collection of racial data is an extension of the use of race as a category, and it's criminalised.
It can be used with very small exceptions,
and independent organisations or non-governmental organisations have been collecting
data given that they deal with communities that are making complaints about,
let's say, profiling, police profiling. But those things are contentious because if there if the data is then promoted publicly,
then it looks like there's an overstep in the use of the concept of race.
But it's the only way, according to lots of groups,
to actually keep track of racial discrimination that's otherwise left to, you know, the Ministry of Labour, for example.
And then in the Netherlands, there have been writers who have written about the place of race and understanding of race in the Netherlands.
So two writers in particular, Philomena, said, who writes about everyday racism and the and the and the relationship between
everyday forms of racism and institutional and structural forms of racism.
And then there's growing. Rebecca, who has written a book recently called White Innocence,
and she uses the I would argue it's a flashpoint issue, which is I don't know if you'd heard of this.
This character called the shots of Pete Black Pete in the Netherlands, which is a character that supposedly fell down a chimney.
That's the that's the later version of of this character.
But earlier versions of the character is that the character is actually from Northern
Africa and has come to the Netherlands with goblins to take children who are poor or bad.
But this is this character is celebrated during Christmas time.
And lots of Dutch people get into blackface where they paint their faces black and red lips, and they're like, they're the shots of Pete.
But this, you know, that in and of itself warrants lots of discussion.
But the the issue there is that the defence of this character plays itself out in stories about, you know, Dutch intentions around being not.
Racist and all of this. But it's defended to such an extent that it creates this other sphere of thinking about the concept of being innocent,
but not wanting to address the potential harm,
the potential harm of this of this character and making this character kind of a centrepiece within the Dutch cultural tradition.
So anyway, these things are all going on at the same time while we're trying to figure
out how to talk about institutional and structural forms of racism in Europe.
And of course, a lot of my work really has been around particular deaths in custody.
So while there is a big gap between the social discussion and the legal discussion on deaths in custody,
that gap for those who are at the front lines trying to argue that racism exists in courts.
So families and activists, I think they experience that not as a gap, but a continuum, continuity of the same discussions.
So what they see happening in their activism outside the courtroom is very relevant to what
they understand to be the thought process among legal actors and judges in the courtroom.
So a couple of other comments to the context that I really breezed through.
This is the relationship between all of this, meaning racism and structural forms of racism and colonialism.
So there's been a lot of writing and and activist work around making those connections really visible from the
decolonise movement within academia all the way through to broader political discussions about coloniality and race.
Not least of all with writing about the Windrush scandal.
Whereupon people remembered the whole. The comment by Joseph Anandan that we are here because you were there.
The idea that Empire really made migration kind of a form to think through issues of race and racism, not only globally, but domestically.
And with the Windrush scandal, also the hostile environment policy that was then turned into the compliant environment policy,
counterterrorism laws relating to the presupposition that we know what suspicion looks like and we know what radicalisation looks like.
So we should just go find it and report on it.
So the Prevent Policy and, and Brexit and writers who have looked at the, the notion that Brexit is a bit of a,
a search for a search for the powerful nostalgic empire that that once was.
All of these discussions, I think, are wrapped up into broader discussions of race.
So that being a big part of the UK context, not least of all,
because there's a shift to the right across a lot of Europe politically in Germany, I think.
I mean, I could have very well showed the show, the poster of Nigel Farage with the, you know,
with a long queue of people in the background saying, you know, we need to close the borders and take our country back.
And the European Union is helping people get across to us. That was a similar political take to these posters from from the alternative for Germany,
the Tea Party, which is currently one of the stronger parties in Germany.
I think it's third it's representative third in the federal parliament in Germany, has 244 seats out of 1866 in state parliaments.
And they have a very direct message about taking Germany back from from foreigners and in particular, in particular from from Muslim people.
So there have been lots of campaign posters that particularly addressed Islam as a focus of contention.
But these two posters, I think, are telling because they reflect not only on the global but the domestic.
So take back the domestic sphere. The first one says Neuer Deutscher, mocking as Elba.
So new Germans will make them ourselves. And the second says, Colourful diversity.
We have it already so blunt of submission.
And it shows, you know, three visibly white Germans in three different outfits, maybe from three regions of Germany.
And part of this is the ongoing messaging about the limits to tolerance and the failure of multiculturalism in all of this,
which legitimises a certain form of othering in terms of the social debates around around race quite broadly.
German activists have been really keen to counter these things and have been quite successful in some ways,
and that should not go unnoticed, particularly when a lot of those activists are also concerned with issues like deaths in custody.
So this is a street sign that was changed formally.
It was the street sign dedicated to someone who had started colonial campaigns and violent campaigns in in German occupied sections of Africa.
And it was renamed a few years ago to my aim. And my aim was a celebrated Afro German poet.
And she wrote in the eighties and nineties about being black and a woman in
Germany and renaming that street didn't erase the history for those activists,
but rather layered a different history on top of it.
And so part of the social discussion that was ongoing around the domestic space and
recognising racism and colonialism as a part of what constitutes the domestic space.
A short aside, I study.
I studied European ethnography in Germany, in Berlin, in Berlin, on a street that is called Morgenstern, which is Street of the Moors.
And there has been a long debate because it's an anthropology institute as well.
So there was there was also, I think, internal anxiety about what does it mean to be an anthropology department and be on the street of the moors?
And shouldn't we try to, like, have a discussion and maybe get the street renamed or have something else come out of that?
And a lot of black Germans and a lot of Germans who are allied with that position have protested over the years,
and many put two dots over the o which so it oome out on the AU to turn it into carrots, creates a monstrosity instead.
So that's a that's one way of, I guess, resisting. So now I'll talk about the case of Ori Jallow,
because this is where I think a lot of these issues then compound into a legal case where the issues are articulated,
but they're in the background and they're there. So Ori Jallow, I'll just say, was a man who was applying for asylum and he was from Sierra Leone.
And in 2005 he was detained by police when a few people who were cleaning up the street really early in the morning,
about 4 a.m., called the police and they said, there's this guy and he's bothering us.
He's asking us lots of questions and he's just bothering us. You should come and get him.
And so it turns out he was asking them to use their phone to make a phone call, and he was slightly drunk.
And so the police came and by that time he was sitting on the side of the road and just sitting there by himself.
So they came and the account of the police is that they detained him.
And this is in Dessau, in a small, small city in former former East Germany.
And they detained him. And by 12:00 noon, he was dead.
He was burned in his police cell. And what happens between then is a mixture of the, you know, the police testimony,
the evidence that that exists and and basically our reconstruction of that.
But I'll just read a bit a couple of snippets about about the case, and I'll jump back and forth a little bit.
The Jallow trials in 2007, so two years after the trial started and 2011 revealed a myriad of mistakes,
police were reported not to have informed the fire department that there was a person in the cell that was ablaze.
So firefighters were surprised when they arrived and found a burnt corpse chained to the mattress on the floor.
Police testified that they had turned off the smoke alarms that registered the fire, claiming to have assumed that the lines were faulty.
They also claim to have turned down the two way radio and Ms.
Jallow screams for help. There were inconsistencies in the police testimony, including parts of their timeline,
and the judge presiding over the initial trial admonished police for their failure to cooperate in the appellate trial.
An officer who witnessed the events on the day invoked her constitutional right not to testify for fear of self-incrimination.
Despite the admissions by police officers, the prosecutor did not see it fit to entertain murder or voluntary manslaughter charges.
Further mistakes were made in the collection of evidence. The autopsy commissioned by police forensics teams missed injuries on Dallas body that
an independent autopsy found a broken nose and a burst eardrum and most recently,
a cracked rib. But I'll get to that.
Forensics footage was erased or not properly recorded, so only a few moments recording of the cells examination exists,
which means a proper determination of the chain of custody of the evidence left behind could not be established.
The debris in the cell was not tested for accelerants during the initial trial,
which, because of the half life of such substances, is a time sensitive matter.
This is ostensibly because the authorities believe Jallow, who committed suicide a lighter, was discovered among the debris collected in the cell.
Three days into the investigation and its president's cuts, its presence constitutes the only hard evidence that Jallow may have committed suicide.
Later. Tests would reveal, however, that the lighter, which was partially melted,
had no fibres from J-Lo's clothing or the mattress and none of Joe's DNA on it.
It was simply assumed through the initial trial and the subsequent appeal,
that this was an unfortunate case of suicide, which the police at worst failed to prevent.
In the first trial, police were acquitted and the retrial found the police guilty of negligence,
which resulted in a relatively modest fine of about €10,000.
The prosecutorial services are reportedly running as. Special investigation its ended also tell you about that.
But the probe is rife with conflicts of interest since the prosecutors are essentially embedded between the police and the courts.
What seems clear is that if there were no public pressure to scrutinise the details surrounding his death,
there would have been little political will to probe beyond the initial 2007 prosecution for negligence.
I'll also mention the prosecutor has a lot of power in these particular cases, because in Germany,
if you die in police custody on a policing situation, there actually isn't a right to a civil trial.
The right exists for the family to append itself to the main prosecutor's trial as a secondary claimant.
And the secondary claimant doesn't actually get the chance to draft the charges.
The prosecutor drops the charges, and the secondary claim just depends themselves to those charges.
That means that although in the Jalloh case, there was, especially in the appellate trial, quite strong legal representation,
the legal representation was was basically confined to the negligence charges and couldn't
raise any evidence that pointed in the direction of someone other than Jallow killing Jallow,
which meant really looking at the timeline to how the police responded to a suicide.
So another part of the issue is, okay, we have the circumstances that we have.
We have forensic evidence that seems to have gaps in it.
So the recording has gaps. The autopsy seemed to have gaps.
The lighter, many argued, because it didn't have any remnants of anything inside the cell on it.
And given the chain of custody, issues should be called into question.
The additional issue is how to raise the issue of racism or race, because there wasn't there wasn't an overt,
you know, attribution to the police testimony that the police said something racist on its face.
Although there are some things that are mentioned and there isn't.
There isn't a very there isn't an overt line of argument that there was overt racism, let's say that.
So the issue is how to bring structural racism into the equation,
whether that means a statistical analysis of similar cases happening or an analysis that is about how the case was handled.
So those things I'll talk about in turn. First, I'll mention some of the things that have been raised during the trial that.
At least raise the question for those who are involved in the case and for those in the German
public who have kind of borne witness to the media around the case since it happened in 2005.
In a trial, the admission of evidence or silence in testimony on an issue can be as damming or exonerating as hard legal evidence.
Legally, this is because one is innocent until proven guilty of a crime, at least in Germany and the rest of Europe.
And without the appropriate evidence, one cannot be held liable under the standard of negligence.
Considering this, it's easy to understand how the activists pushing the original trial forward could come to experience certain evidentiary
omissions and testimonial silences as with as great a weight as suppressing closer engagement with the events of or his death.
I describe these omissions and silences as a type of violence.
This violence is a legal character, enabling and constituting societal violence, among other various episodes.
I discuss three silences and omissions during the course of the trial because they illustrate the repetition of scenes of violence that re,
injure, remind and reinvigorate those involved in pushing the trial forward.
The first is a lack of discussion around the medical examiner's racial remarks about Ori Jallow at the police station.
The second is the differences in physical condition noted between the police autopsy and the independent autopsy, which I will rehash.
I've already mentioned they found additional injuries in the autopsy, and the third is the blank section of the crime scene investigation footage.
So the first issue discussed during the first trial in 2007 in Dessau and carried forward into the second trial in Magdeburg,
concerns a remark made by the medical examiner who took a blood sample from Jallow the night he was detained.
When Officer Schubert called the Examiner to examine for Ajello, the examiner replied that he's never able to find veins in dark skinned people.
So this remark, Schubert laughed and suggested that he should just bring a special instrument to draw blood.
This exchange evidence the general fact that the skin colour and heritage became a topic of
conversation among the medical examiner and the arresting officer during the examination.
And it prompted the black community and others to look for meaning in this exchange.
The racial undertones were familiar, recognisable. Was this what was this special instrument and why was the matter funny?
The impression among black people and activists involved in the trial was that this comment sounded sinister at its worst,
latently racist, at its most benign. And this did not sound like a statement of overt racial disdain or xenophobia,
but it was, for many, informed by fears and fantasies by the white majority.
A psychoanalytic reading of the statement might suggest that the doctor's description reveals his preoccupation with racial difference.
This guiding sense that black people are so different evade his capacity to medically treat them,
that their humanity, like veins, was difficult to identify obscured under dark skin.
Racism operates through these types of images and metaphors, though the doctor may not have meant this consciously.
His statement publicly revealed by way of testimony to add to a community already in a defensive posture,
expose the horrors of what he could potentially have meant. This reinforces mistrust and the assumption of racial foul play.
After all, Jalloh did die hours later, and what happened in between the exchange and his death is contested and obscured.
I also mention that when the police were called, it was it was reported that he was he was black and an African.
And so the police referred to him as the black African.
And then when the forensics team arrives on the scene with the video camera to go to the cell downstairs to take video of the footage,
the forensics investigator,
while he's walking down the stairs before he arrives at the scene, is already saying, I'm going to the cell where a black African has killed himself.
So he's on video. The investigator is kind of coming to the investigation with this presupposition and with the acknowledgement that
we're talking about a particular type of death and at least knowledge of the racial background and the other missing.
I mentioned the autopsy, but the other omission that I talk about is the is the the courtroom footage that was that was not available.
And part of the relevance of that is during the trial, the person who was filming was testifying at the appellate trial.
And he argued that the the camera must have gone out because there was a power outage in the station that day,
which hadn't been argued on record previously.
But not only that, the camera was being held, being held as a mobile camera wasn't plugged in at any point.
And he would have had to argue that he stopped and plug it in outside of the cell because there's not a socket in the cell anyway.
So that testimony kind of. Just lingered in the air.
And the question was, what really happened to this footage? So, I mean,
my point there is that race and racism are part of the larger discussion of questioning the integrity
of the process and also a question of why the integrity of the process may have been broken.
Of course, that sounds conspiratorial, but at the end of the day, conspiracy is also a category of of a claim.
I mean, one could make a claim about conspiracy. That's not what the activists have been claiming, though.
The activists and the family members have been merely trying to understand and articulate what's happened,
keeping racism in the frame as a potential lens for analysis rather than to eliminate it because it doesn't exist as a legal form of analysis.
So the activists have really been pushing this trial forward and not only in the courtroom, but outside of the courtroom.
So part of the issue with not collecting statistics on racial violence or policing violence or even stop and search in Germany,
is that there isn't a statistical way or a statistically agreed upon way to present the idea that
race plays a role structurally in society so that institutional forms of racism in policing exist.
And so the acts that the activists have been trying to accumulate the stories,
not necessarily only for the statistical measure of having a lot of them, but for the qualitative aspects of how these cases are similar.
So I'll just read a couple of more phrases and then I'll get to the for the ending part,
the the human rights aspects highlighting the structural nature of police violence has been a process of excavation.
In the case of those working on the Jalloh case, this is required committing painful stories of the last decade the institutional memory,
the voice, the caravan and the into the initiative of green yellow, alongside regular press releases and articles on their respective websites,
have co-published a small yellow booklet called Break the Silence, the fifth edition of which,
under the subheading Institutional Racism and Due Process in Germany,
highlighted cases of other black and Asian asylum seekers killed by the German police or police in custody or in police custody between 1999 and 2007.
So after that, the list has continued.
It recounts the deaths of Sudanese born Mariama Sarr, for example, who was shot by police in her own home in Hoffenberg in 2001.
It also recalls the death of Laila Condé, who drowned in in Bremen in 2004,
when water was forced into his lungs during an administration of a procedure meant to make suspects of drug possession vomit.
Recounting these and other deaths in the pamphlet, in addition to archiving the systematic use of fatal excessive force by the police,
reopens the wounds of the past decade to expose the body politic to a reckoning that is both deeply painful and potentially profoundly healing.
It once again brings the past into the present and describes the present as a place characterised by violence.
The stories of individuals in the yellow booklet alongside other stories of
black people and people of colour killed in Germany in the last two decades,
most notably the Turkish and Greek men and women killed by the NSU, the National Socialist Underground between 2000 and 2007.
And I can explain the question and answer more about that case, if you'd like.
Form the discursive landscape for making sense of the ongoing pattern of deaths, including their circumstances, legal issues and media reports.
They are relevant not only as an explanation as to what's happening institutional and structural forms of racism,
but also as an explanation for the relentless activism in bringing these deaths to light.
Criticism of these violent episodes has been pitted against institutions and structures rather than individual,
independent acts of abuse perpetrated by bad apples.
The stories have similarities that make subsequent stories sound hauntingly familiar and these familiar.
This familiarity perpetually renews the feeling of a need for action.
For example, the death of Christy Fund back in 2011 echoed back to the death of Mariam Assar ten years earlier,
on the basis that police officers fatally shot a black woman in possession of a knife and no prosecution was launched.
It also echoed the deaths of Dominique Amadio and Mira Cora, each fatally shot in possession of a knife.
These deaths indicate a pattern of disproportionate violence if one considers that there are ways to disarm people without killing them.
Knowing these patterns shapes the expectation of people of colour vis a vis the police in Germany and indeed across Europe.
The stories give names and details to the pattern of violence, offering a technical awareness of the ideas of disproportionate response.
And I'll just read one one last part.
The original case is very particular in facts. However, in the process of discussing both the episode of violence that led to his death,
as well as the legal responses that ensued, activists regularly mention cases that are similar on distinct points.
Some of this has to do with the temporal proximity of other cases to the jail issue.
For example, the same year in which Diallo died in police custody in South L.A., Alma was killed in police custody,
which means that Condé is mentioned in some of the rallies and demonstrations held to honour the life of Jello.
And in 2011, the trial of the death of George Floyd was punctuated by two other custodial deaths.
Christy Fund, who I mentioned in 2011 and Usman say in 2012,
who was handcuffed and taken into custody rather than being taken to a hospital where he should
have been taken because he was having a mental health episode and then died of cardiac arrest.
And so the activists have created a campaign that used similar colours and and kind
of visual techniques to indicate that there's a pattern of deaths in custody.
So that's very yellow on the left. Christy Schoen back in the middle and Usman say they're on the right.
So. Yeah.
It's just a picture of the trial. The last thing I'll mention about the original trial in itself is that activists haven't only
been trying to raise awareness about the pattern of death in custody outside of the courtroom.
They've also been actively pushing forward the limits of evidentiary concerns within the courtroom.
So it was really interesting because the two learn about this as as for me,
a researcher and then later as a trial observer for the original trial and now as
a member of an independent civilian commission looking into the death of Jallow,
it's been interesting to see how the medical examiners and the state prosecutors and the courts are linked in a certain way so
that it's difficult sometimes to get medical examiners to give an independent opinion outside of the context of the court trial,
because it's seen as quite a hot case. And medical examiners, in our experience, have tended to have a bit of preoccupation getting involved.
So they don't really want to get involved,
which meant that the the family and activists needed to look outside of Germany for some of their their expert testimony.
So read just two paragraphs. A dead pig wearing a yellow t shirt and dark trousers was burning in a custom
built set outside as the light gradually dimmed over the Irish city of Waterford.
Five of us peeled clementines and watched thin ribbons of smoke waft out from the top of the doorframe.
The pig, fully clothed and chained to a mattress, was Delos proxy.
The process of having to recreate the scene was as humiliating as it was traumatic,
particularly because those who knew Giallo, but for those who knew Jello.
This investigation, however, was necessary.
Maxime Marino.
His goal was to ascertain whether or not Jell-O could have been so thoroughly scorch without the use of fuel or some chemical accelerant.
So Maxime Smirnov was a former Belarussian police officer who specialises in fire investigations, and he's based in in Ireland.
It felt as though these tests, along with the very question of police involvement at all in his death,
had been banished to a place beyond the German border.
These inquiries were only allowed to exist in exile, away from the fears and preoccupations of Germany's postracial imaginary.
As the smoke thin and the fire died, we open the shed doors to inspect the scene.
We were shaken, but convinced neither the pigs flesh nor the mattress it had been laid upon resembled J-Lo's charred remains.
Of course it wouldn't. I thought a body. This body does not just combust for legal reasons, having to do with the production of evidence.
The results of the fire analysis could not be entered directly into evidence in the new trial,
but that does not mean that Smirnoff's work was shoddy science in terms of the dimensions and materials of the cell air circulation,
mattress materials, clothing on the body and alleged heat source.
It was fairly accurate as a recreation.
The outcome, presented at a press conference, raised doubts as to whether the assumed circumstances of his death were physically possible.
And this is picture of the mattress in Northern Ireland with the cadaver on it.
But you can't see anything. You just see flames at the press conference.
And the press conference with this fire test was held in Germany and it attracted lots of attention, media attention.
And it also is credited with getting the prosecutors to open a special investigation.
This was after the police were charged with negligence and the special investigation
was to look and see if there's any credit to the idea that it wasn't a suicide.
That has ended. And just in two words, the special investigation was was closed down.
During the process of that,
one of the prosecutors in an internal letter wrote that he thought maybe there was third party involvement or not a suicide.
But then then the investigation was taken from his office and transferred to a different prosecutor's office and closed down.
New evidence commissioned by the Family, which was a reading of old CT scans,
so computed tomography X-ray scans from 2005, but scans that had never been analysed.
They were read and analysed by a clinic in Frankfurt,
and the result of those scans was that the injuries that Gela sustained, what happened before he died.
So a lot of the argument in court was that, well,
these injuries could have happened to a person's dead body in the transport from one place to another.
So a broken rib, a broken nose and an burst eardrum.
And now also a broken internal sinus area, not medically trained,
but those injuries and it has been argued that because he didn't have much adrenaline or that adrenaline,
the type of adrenaline, Neal, adrenaline in his system or sitting in his lungs.
He's probably wasn't breathing or awake or alive when the fire happened.
So those crucial pieces of evidence have been offered, but the investigation was not reopened.
So there's been a new decision to keep the investigation closed despite those pieces of evidence.
So that's part of the reason why we have a commission to look into the handling of the trial from beginning to end,
which is a civilian led commission, mostly by lawyers and experts outside of Germany, but with some German experts involved.
So the last part and just the last few minutes, because I think it's the more technical one, is the one where there's the question,
it's what do we actually ask for when we demand human rights, particularly around the right to life, potentially at the European level?
So we might have now exhausted the local remedies in Germany.
So it might be time to go to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. What does that mean?
So the right to life, as I explained, is the right not to be killed.
And the language is everyone's right to life shall be protected by law.
No one should be deprived of the right to life. Intentionally save the execution of a sentence of a court following his conviction of a crime.
Although the death penalty doesn't exist in Europe,
deprivation of life shall not be regarded as inflicted in contravention of this article when results from the use of force,
which is no more than absolutely necessary in defence of a person from unlawful violence in order to
effect a lawful arrest or in an action lawfully taken for the purpose of quelling a riot or insurrection.
So those provisions allow for policing related deaths or legally authorised killings,
as I think the UK language is to take place in the context where there's defence of one person against another,
or in a policing type situation like those the.
Some of the caselaw that's relevant is that safeguards need to be practical and effective.
That's McCann case versus the U.K.
There's a prohibition on intentional deprivation of life, subject to strict exceptions, and the right to life also applies to near-death situations.
I'll mention there's Article three, which is the right not to be treated inhumanely or tortured, and that's a separate article.
So you can raise both of those depending on the case. Then there's the.
The policing death, the specific types of cases.
So the burden is on the government to provide a plausible explanation, explanation as to how the person died.
And in the German case, a very telling would be the explanation was he killed himself.
We've done an evidential analysis and that's the answer.
So that would be the government's response potentially. And specific techniques that hasten death are understood to violate Article two.
So positional asphyxiation, which is very common as a term in this context, in the UK context.
But we also have a different prong of Article two, which isn't just how the person died, but how the death was investigated.
So the obligation to investigate is a separate procedural grounds.
Procedural grounds for a violation of the right to life investigation has to be independent, adequate,
which means it has to be capable of gathering evidence and determining whether the police behaviour was unlawful has to be prompt.
There should be a for next to promptness should be prompt.
There has to be able to be public scrutiny,
which means procedures and decision making should be open and transparent in order to ensure accountability.
And there has to be victim involvement in at least the complaint.
I'll also mention that in Germany there is no inquest process. There is only the prosecution.
And there's a potential special investigation by by prosecutors, which is very rare.
And there's a parliamentary inquiry process which isn't a cardinal coronial coroner's inquest.
It is a parliamentary parliamentary investigation into the evidence that exists in the case, which is also not very common.
I already mentioned Article 14 can work in conjunction with Article two in order to argue that there's
been a violation of the person's rights or discriminatory reason or in a discriminatory manner.
And that is also an additional line of reasoning.
So one has to actually have a mode of reasoning,
three examples that show that this is possible to achieve but but might indicate
that it's difficult to achieve for the Jalloh case or not versus Bulgaria,
which is seen as one of the leading cases in policing and race.
But in that case, Roma military workers were shot by military police who were screaming, You gypsies, you damn gypsies screaming, but translated.
And that also shows that the the background of the the men was known to police.
And so there was seem to be a violation of articles two and 14.
But the violation of Article 14, the discrimination was not for the actual killing.
It was for the failure to follow up on whether there are racist motives.
So it just shows that there is there are different ways that the court will interpret whether those comments by police was
itself a form of showing that the murders were happening or the killings were happening with a racial intent or racial gaze.
So whether it's simply that the investigation didn't do enough to follow up the backhoes versus Chris and the Angelo versus Bulgaria's case,
cases are similar in as much as Article three and Article two.
Were violated along with Article 14, but only for the investigation.
For the Becca's case,
there was a lack of follow up after there was a policing survey and the police were seen to have acted in a similarly racist way by by 30 testimonies.
And the Angelo the case was a case where it was dragged out so long that, you know,
a killing of a Roma man by a group of teenagers should have been investigated really early on, especially if there was racist intent.
It should have been at least interrogated early on and that it took over ten years.
So it's difficult to bring these types of cases to the FCC.
H.R. takes a long time. Prosecutorial power in in Germany and possibly elsewhere in Europe means that you can exhaust local remedies,
and it can look very much like there's been an adequate attention given to the details of the case.
But there hasn't perhaps been as much family involvement.
There hasn't been perhaps a way to introduce evidence that would actually speak to the broader claims being made.
And there's a high bar in showing an actual racial in the actual killing, having a racial undertone.
And perhaps it's easier to show that there's been a lack of of attention to race or racism in the investigation.
But what do we want from that? What do we want then to show?
If we can show that the investigation into the racism that potentially is kind of pervading these cases exists.
What is the outcome of that? And for some,
it means that the investigation or a consistent lack of attention to racism in
investigations can be a sign that something needs to change in the domestic sphere.
The HHR would probably not be in a position to give a direct course of action to what countries need to do to remedy that.
And there's a big margin of appreciation. But then the question is how activists and families can use a judgement like this to spur,
you know, a different approach within their national jurisdictions.
So just in the final note on what exists in the U.K.,
there's a mandatory Article two inquest investigation by the IPCC into misconduct by police prosecution brought by the Crown Prosecution Service,
a civil suit brought by families or those left behind, and a potential inquiry,
a public inquiry around certain types of death, like with the Stephen Lawrence death.
In France, there's a service inspection held by the Ministry of the Interior, but it's independent.
It's independent of the police, and it can be called by any victim of police violence.
I'm not sure how effective this is. There's also an independent commission that can be called through and peace.
But again, that's at a parliamentary level.
And in Spain, there's and again, I don't know the Spanish context, and my colleagues might know there's alliances with the, you know,
the La Policia Nationale, which has the usual norms restricting the lethal violence like we saw with the language from Article two.
And then there's Article 62 of paragraph two, paragraph two, which notes that that in cases where policing activity constitutes a crime,
the district attorney is not able to determine the nature of the crime.
Instead, the relevant judicial authority has to conduct an independent investigation.
And I'm not sure what independence in this context could mean.
So that's a question that I, I have to to research.
While in Germany, as I mentioned, the the public prosecutor really has the only power to draft the charges that go forward.
And the family is given a role as the secondary claimant that they can clear.
But this role, I mean, maybe to put it controversially,
maybe that's a way of allowing them to have just enough input not to make a big not to make a big impact on the direction of the case.
So it's not a full civil and it's not the ability to bring a full civil case where they could at least ask broader questions.
And given that there's no inquest,
the only real avenue for the activists and family members outside of a special prosecutorial investigation is to take matters into their own hands,
create the evidence, the persuasive arguments, bring the media into it, and get a forum set up that resembles kind of the evidentiary fora of the law,
but brings the law into the discussion in a in a public forum.
So that's what's been essentially happening.
And lastly, they've set up this commission of which I'm a part to try to to get experts from different other areas to give comparative input,
but not only in law, in activism. So there are activists who are a part of the commission and an academic input.
So sociologists and those of us who are looking at the law, but from a bit of more academic standpoint,
to look at broader issues, not simply the facts of the case forward,
but looking at the broader context of how it is that the institutions aren't able to deal with the claims about structural
racism within legal institutions and how to potentially make it a broader discussion and take it outside as a legal forum.
So I guess I'll stop there. I think I'm over time. Thank you very much.