Speaking the Language of the Dead

The Epistemic Structure of Legal Terminologies

Abstract

Every year, thousands of migrants die attempting to reach Europe. The IOM Missing Migrants Project has recorded more than 30,000 deaths and disappearances on Mediterranean routes since 2014, and the majority of those who die on migratory routes are never identified. When remains are forensically identified through the INTERPOL Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) framework, a second, largely invisible failure routinely occurs: that identification cannot be converted into the legal recognition that surviving families require. Death certificates are not issued. Inheritance proceedings do not commence. Burial rights remain deferred.

This document argues that the cause of this failure is not inadequate translation. It is structural legal incommensurability: the DVI framework was developed within a Latin-derived legal epistemology that does not travel, without loss of legal force, into the Arabic legal systems of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories: the jurisdictions from which the majority of affected families originate. The terminology of MDVI (ante mortem, post mortem, together with its categories of primary and secondary identifiers and its thresholds of possible and probable identity) functions within European legal systems as inferential legal architecture, authorising specific evidentiary moves and licensing specific legal conclusions. When rendered into Arabic, the linguistic shells of these terms cross the border; their legal functions do not.

This is a legal problem. It requires legal solutions. This document sets out the analysis and five structured institutional recommendations required to begin closing the gap.