I think it is important to not fall for the myth that anyone can just point to their rights and get whatâs on a piece of paper, but to also remember that the state has to keep up the fiction of âthe rule of lawâ and âequality before the lawâ and we can strategically use that to our advantage, especially if we work together.
For example: disability rights activists, working together with pro bono lawyers and lawyers paid for by fund raising, have filed many successful lawsuits against violations of disability acts, and have achieved the material changes they wanted. Those wins are real and result in real accessibility.
The idea that every disabled person can use the âlegal systemâ to stand up for their ârightsâ is bullshit. Even with access to a pro bono lawyer, most people donât have the spoons and the time. But disability activists working together can achieve real results that every disabled person benefits from.
And the fact that activists (again, working together with pro bono lawyers and lawyers paid for by fund raising) regularly take cops to court over rights violations does have an impact too. It rarely gets the direct results we wanted, but it is costly and bad press and definitely creates incentive among the middle management types to limit the number of the rights violations.
If you doubt that, hereâs an example:
After an arrest in the Netherlands, cops can hold you for up to 9 working hours. Cops hate activists, so when a bunch of activists get arrested, you can bet theyâre going to be in there for 8 hours and 59 minutes. They also try to book people at 15.01, so they can hold them until 24.01, which means theyâre released the next morning.Â
Now ask yourself: why go through all that trouble if laws are a fiction? Why not just hold all the activists for 20 hours? or 5 days? The answer is simple: because the legal aftermath of that would be a huge expensive hassle and they have to maintain the fiction of being law abiding.
Sometimes the cops ignore the fiction and do hold someone for 20 hours or 5 days with no legal ground. It happens. But it would be much much more common if we stopped being a huge legal pain in the ass and publicly making noise every time they violated their own fictions.
And of course thatâs not just happening in the Netherlands. Every time your rights are not violated when it would be profitable for a company or fun for the cops to do so, itâs because they have to keep up the fiction or potentially deal with a huge hassle.
We shouldnât rely on ârightsâ to create a just world, but as long as this fiction is here, we canât ignore it either. Because it we stop making a hassle about it, then our enemies will really be able to just drop the fiction and do whatever the fuck they want.
