Professions and profiles : epistemic communities and the registration of human rights violations

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the critical service provided by lawyers and social workers of the Comité and Vicaría’s Legal Department in their work with relatives and direct victims of political repression. Based on archival documentation, secondary literature, and interviews with former staff members, it explores how these professions and their respective epistemes supported those persecuted by the regime. It argues that an interdisciplinary style of working emerged, and was sustained over a nineteen-year period, by a professional community that gave practical form to the Catholic Church’s desire to protect and foster human dignity. The chapter demonstrates that this work was sustained by a combination of professional acumen; a substantial degree of professional innovation in the face of an urgent and uncertain situation; an amount of political, community, and trades union organisational skill and experience, and the adoption of a humanitarian ethos that drew no distinctions of class, origin, or political affiliation.