Relational Human Rights: Shed‐DNA and the Identification of the ‘Living Disappeared’ in Argentina

Abstract

Through an ethnographic reading of an Argentine Supreme Court decision I explore the changing nature of the legal subject of human rights in light of emerging technologies. Guillermo Gabriel Prieto was suspected of being a ‘living disappeared’, one of the estimated 500 infants or young children forcibly abducted by the last military dictatorship in Argentina. They were raised by the perpetrators of the crime or their accomplices and kept unaware of their birth origins. The Court's deliberations focused on Guillermo's appeal of a lower‐court decision to carry out an identity test based on his shed‐DNA. The decision demonstrates that while the subject of human rights has often been equated with the bounded individual, new technologies challenge us to reconsider the subject's core characteristics: physical boundedness, autonomy, and individuality. I argue that the ruling offers us an alternative conception of the subject that could become the foundation for a new vision of human rights