The attribution of responsibility to perpetrators of human rights abuses.

Pécher, Stéphanie [UCL]

From a social point of view, it is important to understand how human rights violations are represented in the different discourses that recount them. Indeed, the way these discourses represent the abuses may influence the way they are perceived within the population. In this sense, a linguistic approach can be particularly interesting. This study therefore analyses the discursive construction of human rights violations, and more specifically the attribution of responsibility to the perpetrators, in the discursive genre of human rights reports. Various studies already have been carried out on the topic of human rights violations. In the Hispanic context, which interests us, various authors explore the discursive construction of the violations committed during the different dictatorships that characterized the 20th century of Latin America. For instance, Achugar (1999; 2007; 2009) analyses the representation of the abuses in the military discourse about the Uruguayan dictatorship. In the Chilean context, Oteíza (2017; 2020) investigates the means of representation of the abuses committed during the dictatorship of Pinochet in history classroom interactions. De Cock and Michaud Maturana (2014; 2018) study various aspects of the Rettig report such as the attribution of responsibility, which is particularly interesting for this work. Whereas the existing literature tends to focus on past events, this study analyses a more contemporary context, namely the abuses committed during the social protests that arose in Chile in 2019. The corpus is made of two human rights reports, published by Amnesty International (Amnesty International, 2020) and by an organism of the United Nations (OHCHR, 2019), and both written in Spanish. In order to study the attribution of responsibility, the expression of agentivity was investigated in the corpus. In Spanish, we can hide the agent thanks to various linguistic strategies such as the use of the passive voice without an agent, the “se” impersonal structure and nominalizations. The corpus was analysed using the five levels of agentivity developed by De Cock and Michaud Maturana (2014; 2018) in the framework of their analysis of the Rettig report, published after the Dictatorship of Pinochet in Chile. The authors have established these levels on the basis of three main criteria: the nature of the perpetrators’ references, the syntactic function of these references and the transitivity of the verb. The present analysis revealed a tendency to reduce the agentivity in the report of the OHCHR (e.g. use of the passive voice and impersonal structures with “se”), whereas the report of Amnesty International tends to maximize the agentivity (e.g. use of active verbs with explicit subjects). The attribution of responsibility to the perpetrators is therefore represented differently in both reports, which can be explained by the different objectives they pursue. A further step is to analyse the attribution of responsibility in a wider corpus, made of four discursive genres (human rights reports, criminal lawsuits, newspapers articles and tweets), taking into account how the text’s genre and legal status influence the expression of agentivity. This will imply testing and amplifying the proposed taxonomy of agentivity which was initially developed for the specific genre of human rights reports. In this presentation, I will then also include the preliminary results of a pilot study on these next steps.