Nonperson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
 |
| A Soviet "nonperson" vanishes: commissar Nikolai Yezhov retouched after falling from favor and being executed in 1940. |
 |
This article does not cite any references or sources. (October 2007) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. |
A non-person is a person or a member of a group who lacks, loses, or is forcibly denied social or legal status, especially basic human rights, or who effectively from a point of view of traceability, documentation or existence, ceases to have a record of their existence within a society. It also includes people who do in fact die, but in a manner that their death is never verifiable and enquiries result in a "blank wall" of "nobody knows".
As such, some common ways people become non-persons are:
- Never having been sufficiently documented as existing
- Losing the trail of documentation (or its deletion) so that the specific person can no longer easily be linked to a documentary record or cannot be shown officially to have existed
- Covert abduction by government or other bodies combined with plausible deniability
- Long term absence or other circumstances leading to an incorrect belief and legal documentation that they have in fact died
- Death, when it is unverifiable and left as an open case what has happened.
- Fraudulent reporting of a person as having died when in fact they have not (which can happen for economic reasons in India and other countries, a form of fraud)
- Marginalized or homeless people who live without cash or formal abode and therefore do not appear on official records.
Note: asserting that someone is a nonperson is implicitly a normative statement; because by doing so it also is implied simultaneously that the person referred to is entitled to the rights any person should have. Who is a person and what every person is entitled to depends on context and social norms. For example, wards that are under the authority of a legal guardian due to infancy, incapacity or disability are usually not held to be nonpersons.
Contents |
[edit] Examples
There are many possible meanings associated with the term "nonperson," some more dramatic than others.
[edit] Prison camps
One example are the Nazi extermination camps, in which Jews, Hindus (Gypsies), homosexuals, pedophiles, and individual political prisoners were treated as "non persons." Since the purpose of these camps was to anonymize, use where possible, and dispose of these "unwanted elements" efficiently. "Non-person" status was required because it easily removed the moral and social obstacles for committing questionable acts of violence, crime and abuse.
[edit] Unofficially missing people
Some people are covertly held by government or other bodies, and effectively cease to exist. This has happened in dictatorial regimes such as Chile under Pinochet, the USSR and Fascist Spain. To dodge pointed questions regarding supposedly democratically controlled governments covertly holding people or employing torture, plausible deniability of knowledge might be used. The alleged ghost detainees in a secret CIA prison system is an example of this.
In today's world this is to an extent made both easier and harder by technology — easier because reliance upon technology is such that if a person's information is wiped off computers or was never documented that way, they effectively cease to exist; harder because with every stage of a person's life from birth to death accumulating bureaucratic transactions, it becomes more and more likely they leave an official record somewhere.
[edit] "Third World" countries
 |
The neutrality or factuality of this article or section may be compromised by unattributed statements. You can help Wikipedia by removing weasel worded statements.This section has been tagged since May 2008. |
It can be argued that many people born (and deceased) in some "Third World" countries have never had their birth or death registered by any official (state or other) institution and thus those people were never accounted for anywhere, which is almost equivalent to non-existence and thus it would be very difficult for bureaucracies to grant them what would be considered as basic human rights, human dignity etc.
An unusual form of non-human status is not uncommon in India for economic reasons, where people who leave a village for some time may be reported as having died by others, or by family or landlords, and have their land subsequently seized. It can be very complex to regain status as a legally recognized living human being, a prerequisite to regaining the land, especially given the ease of corruption of officials to maintain the status quo and the difficulties faced by a person who does not officially exist, in gaining access to money or recognition to pursue the action legally. There are a number of well known "officially dead" people who have no social recourse as a result, and have become non-persons.[citation needed]
This type of fraudulent reporting of death is actively under review by government and other bodies.[citation needed]
[edit] Industrialized countries
Pro-life supporters argue there are examples of "non-persons" even in industrialized countries, through judgements like Roe v. Wade. Segregation is another issue treated in Plessy v. Ferguson. In general, a person not showing up on any official documents, nor economically or socially active or living outside of what is defined the "productive system" or "organized society" could be classified as a non-person, as it would be very hard or even impossible for that person to claim any political, legal or constitutional rights (as well as being apparently unbound by any legal duties or obligations). This is often the case of homeless and marginal people in general.
Also, some legally detained prisoners can be considered to be in a quasi non-person status, temporarily or indefinitely, to different extents depending on the reasons and conditions of detention. For example, in most countries ordinary prisoners are denied any political rights like voting while in the most severe cases total or partial isolation from the outside world can be inflicted.
[edit] Demonization
The "non person" status can also be consciously or unconsciously applied to unwanted persons (demonizing them) by their surrounding society. Such can be the case of a state versus homeless or marginal people or it can be extended and applied versus an entire nation or ethnic group, as it often happens in wars or other conflicts. This was the case for example of the Nazi state versus the Jews or of most societies versus the Gypsies, but it is often applied in times of war versus the enemy nation, by stripping its people of their "person status" and demonizing them, making them appear like monsters (not humans) and thus indirectly justifying any excess or abuse committed against them. An example of this is the demonization of the Serbs during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s which lead subsequently to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999.
It can be argued that the "non-person" status, apart from the Nazi camps, can be found in its most literal form when considering certain prisoners of war, especially if they are or are considered to be illegal combatants. An example of that could be the Guantanamo bay prison where several people from all over the world are held without public precise charges against them, are denied any form of access to the outside world (and vice-versa) and are in an unclear/controversial legal status, apart from partial or total anonymity.
[edit] Nonpersons in fantasy and fiction
Nonpersons are described in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as certain people who were taken away were erased from existence by means of altering records. The newspeak word for such a person was an "unperson".
