When new legislation comes before parliament, it is often referred to a scrutiny committee that undertakes a detailed examination of the proposed law and then makes recommendations in the form of a report to parliament about the proposed law. Some parliamentary committee meetings are broadcast publicly, such as the United Kingdom House of Commons’ Culture, Media, and Sport Select Committee inquiry into News International and phone-hacking, and the hearings of the United States House of Representatives’ Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.
More typically, the meetings of parliamentary scrutiny committees are held behind closed doors, enabling parliamentarians and their advisors to frankly exchange views on the impacts of proposed laws, including their impacts on human rights.
But if the work of scrutiny committees often takes place in private, with publics gaining only limited access to these encounters, this raises questions. If these processes exclude public audiences, can they still reach considered conclusions on the human rights impacts of legislation on the public? Can these processes be considered democratic if they lack transparency?
In a recent article from our project on drugs and human rights, we contend that these meetings, comings-together and encounters do the work of (per)forming human rights assessments of legislation. We argue that we need to take these ‘backstage encounters’ seriously if we are to understand the ways in which human rights scrutiny is performed in parliament and how conclusions are reached in contested claims for human rights.
Drawing from interviews with performers in these human rights scrutiny processes, we examine how public audiences access and understand these performances of parliamentary human rights scrutiny, and what obligations the actors in these performances might hold towards their audiences. We also question how the spaces of committee meetings, the absence of an outside audience, and the differing levels of knowledge on the part of parliamentary actors affect the performance of human rights scrutiny.
Reflecting on these matters, we contend that parliamentary spaces need to be reconfigured to accommodate and engage public audiences and that parliamentary actors need to be trained to consider the impact of their human rights scrutiny work on publics. We also question the degree to which parliamentarians’ personal life experiences and other materials brought into the parliamentary committee have a bearing on the human rights scrutiny process.
Our paper demonstrates how a detailed examination of the performative dimensions of parliamentary human rights scrutiny can call into question established practices. It will be coming out in a special issue of Documenta on theatre and law later this year.
Citation: Mulcahy, S. & Seear, K. (2023). ‘Backstage performances of parliamentary scrutiny, or coming together in parliamentary committee rooms’, Documenta, 42(1)