A hunger striker at Idomeni, Greece on 24 Nov. Photo by Cameron Thibos. (CC 4.0-by)Today, on International Migrants Day, the United Nations will call once again for the fulfillment and protection of the human rights of the world’s migrants and spokespersons for the Australian Government as well as for European Union member states will doubtless mouth support for that ideal. But a fortnight ago, in an open letter, hundreds of migrants and asylum seekers held at the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre called on the Australian Government to execute them rather than force them to continue indefinitely to experience ‘gradual death’ on the island. The previous week, those stranded on Greece’s northern border with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia by the introduction of a policy granting passage only to people from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, also staged protests. They started a hunger strike, some sewing their lips together using nylon thread. They also sought to block the railway line running between the two countries. One group of Bangladeshi men involved in the protest had slogans written in red paint on their bared chests—"Shoot us or save us," read one.
How should we respond to these calls?
It is widely assumed that liberal democratic societies are governed by political leaders who are civilised and humane, and accountable to the people whose combined will they represent. One of the ways this assumption is supported is by means of contrasts between past and present. In ancient times, we are taught, emperors, kings, and princes claimed absolute and arbitrary power over life and death. Like the Roman patriarch who, having given life to his children and slaves, was entitled to end it when he saw fit, despotic sovereigns of old exercised the right to ‘let live or make die’ their subjects, as French philosopher Michel Foucault put it. In Europe, this right was gradually diluted, the story goes, with the sovereign power to ‘make die’ increasingly justified only where the sovereign's very existence was under threat. As the modern age advanced, the rightful exercise of sovereign power was more and more understood to be that directed towards the administration and management of life.
