Law as the Game of Truth in the Case of Xerzan Cemetery

Summary, in English

From legal positivism describing law through correctness and certainty to critical studies challenging law's formal truth-seeking by elaborating on its inevitable distance to experience, the relation of law to truth has been long discussed. Adopting a Foucauldian understanding of truth that depends on the deployment of various knowledges, this article focuses on the law's participation in truth-making, drawing on the case of Xerzan Cemetery in Northern Kurdistan. In December 2017, the Turkish Military bombed Xerzan Cemetery, where mostly PKK guerrillas were buried. The operation was followed by excavating the graves and exhumating dead bodies without informing the families. The families and the public learned that the bones exhumated from Xerzan were secretly buried in the Cemetery of the Nameless, Istanbul, in 2019, after staying at the Istanbul Forensic Medicine Institute for more than one year. Two narratives were formed through different legal framings by the governorship and human rights lawyers, pointing at the laws through which the case should be discussed. These legal framings engaging in the representation of the case enact two different truth orders through which dead bodies are attributed different meanings. Within the scope of broader ethnographic research, this article explores how competing legal framings engage in representations of the case in different ways.

• Author: Cansu Bostan
• Department/s: Department of Sociology of Law
• Publishing year: 2022
• Language: English
• Pages: 216-239
• Publication/Series: Oñati Socio-Legal Series
• Volume: 12
• Issue: S1
• Links: https://opo.iisj.net/index.php/osls/article/view/1588/1793
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: Onati International Institute for the Sociology of Law
• Topic: Law and Society
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 2079-5971