The State of Exception

Abstract

After World War II, the horror of the Holocaust and the concentration camps led the international community to develop universal human rights, grouped under a solemn declaration, in order to prevent that tragedy from happening again. The most terrible aspect of the conditions which the Jews suffered in those camps was that they were stripped of any rights, both legal and natural ones. However, in the last twenty years the world has, according to Giorgio Agamben, witnessed a renewed emergence of camps whose logic is similar to those in Nazi Germany: prisoners detained there are tortured, sexually abused and denied any rights that are commonly attributed to human beings almost everywhere. If these camps are illegal, they are not completely outside the law, but they are permitted under the extraordinary circumstance of the “War on Terror”. What Agamben has rightly stressed is that the concept of a “state of exception” under which the legal order is not valid, that a lot of countries implicitly adopt in the fighting against terrorism, is the same behind the concentration camps. Nazi Germany, in fact, did not operate in violation of the Weimar Constitution, but within the framework of its articles that allowed the government to suspend individual rights in case of necessity. Thus, “from a juridical perspective, the entire Third Reich can be considered a state of exception that lasted twelve years” (Agamben 2005: 2).