Human Rights, Colonial Criminality, and the Death of Kwementyaye Briscoe in Custody: A Central Australian Case Study

The intersection of colonialism, legal systems, and human rights is revealed in the Alice Springs Watch House, a place for the temporary custody of, usually intoxicated, Aboriginal men. “Kwementyaye Briscoe” became the fourth death in custody since 1999; and this article draws on his coronial inquest. The post-mortem humanity of the coroner is contrasted with the uncaring disregard of the police for Briscoe while he lived. These contradictory postures reveal the contingency of Aboriginal people's human rights in the neoliberal colonial state. Critical criminology has revealed that the Australian legal system has been complicit in establishing and reproducing the Aboriginal “criminal”. Relative to colonial relations of power, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the associated machinery of international law are relatively recent phenomena. This articles questions: What can a consideration of the discourse of human rights bring to an understanding of the treatment of an Aboriginal man in custody, and is this discourse complicit? Also, would sanctioning human rights in national law, via, for example, a bill of rights, legitimize human rights while simultaneously revealing their tacit assumptions? Agamben's concept of “bare life” sheds light on the paradoxes of human rights, as they are intensified in this custodial context.