As researchers of parliamentary human rights scrutiny, we often confront the overwhelmingly textual legal archive and find absences and gaps in the way that processes are documented. These textual records are but remnants or what art scholar Herbert Molderings might term ‘a fragmentary, petrified vestige of a lively process that took place at a different time in a different place.’
In our latest article, entitled ‘Searching for performance in the legal archive: On the fragments and petrified remnants of parliamentary human rights scrutiny’ and published in the journal Legalities, we pick up this idea of ‘fragments’ to explore how we confront archival gaps and use the fragments and remnants that remain to make informed speculation on the often behind-closed-doors legal performance of parliamentary human rights scrutiny.
Because of the range of issues that are excluded from the archival records we have been studying, we have had to turn to other sources, such as 3D captures of committee rooms that show the architectural details and furniture arrangements in these spaces, video recordings of public committee hearings and parliamentary debates, and the accounts of parliamentarians that participate in these processes whether from their own writings on them or interviews with them.
Through these other archival sources, we can see the spatial arrangements and adornments in committee rooms, where parliamentarians address their remarks, who they face and the distance between those they address, and the mundanity of these processes, reflected in parliamentarians texting on their phones during hearings and having altercations during a break reported in the autobiography of former politician, Fiona Patten.
These fragments provide a richer picture of how human rights scrutiny processes unfold and a more coherent narrative of the factors influencing these processes, but can they fully capture the performance itself?
Our article considers the methodological challenges of examining parliamentary human rights scrutiny from its archives and questions whether there are other, better ways of documenting and archiving law and legal performances more broadly.