In , a German man named Armin Meiwes found someone through a cannibalism fetish website to consent to being killed and eaten. After meeting, Meiwes killed the victim and butchered his body, freezing the meat for future consumption. Meiwes was apprehended and arrested several months later. Although cannibalism was not illegal in Germany, Meiwes was initially convicted of manslaughter. He later received a retrial at the prosecutors' request, and was convicted of murder.
Please help us improve our site! No thank you. LII Wex Cannibalism. And these laws take no notice of arguments that the victim somehow consented to what was done to him or her. Instead, they simply make certain kinds of behavior off limits, regardless of the state of mind of the victim. Invoking international human rights law, German prosecutors should aggressively pursue the Meiwes case as a crime of torture. There is no impediment to their doing so, for in German courts, European Union law and international treaties enjoy a legal status wholly equivalent to that of domestic German statutes.
Granted, under German law, German constitutional norms will prevail over contrary terms of treaties ratified by Germany. But in this case, the problem with prosecuting Meiwes reportedly is not that the German Constitution forbids it. Instead, the problem is merely that domestic criminal laws are difficult to apply to the unique -- to say the least -- facts of Meiwes's case. Importantly, there is no due process issue here: Because treaties against torture were part of German law, Meiwes was fully on notice they could apply to his acts -- including his acts against a fellow German citizen.
Indeed, the criminality of Meiwes's acts was hardly subtle. Meiwes's acts, to apply the U. It is not as if Meiwes were being indicted for obscure tax offenses; rather, he killed, dismembered, and consumed another human being.
What specific charges might German prosecutors bring? To begin, there are a number of European law claims they could raise. The Convention states in Article 3 that, "no one should be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Second, they could try to bring charges pursuant to the European Convention on the Prevention of Torture -- which entered into force in and which has been ratified by Germany.
This agreement created a committee that investigates allegations of torture, primarily by conducting visits to the torture victim's place of confinement. Here, the investigation ought to be brief, as Meiwes has confessed and the nature of his crimes is clear. While the Convention itself does not contain any remedies, it does allow torture victims to bring claims before the highly respected European Court of Human Rights, which has the authority to afford "just satisfaction" to the harmed party or his heirs.
In addition to this European law against torture, there is also international law against torture -- upon which the German prosecutors might also draw.
International law recognizes a select handful of norms, called jus cogens , that are held to form the bedrock legal principles for acceptable civilized existence. Torture is among the actions typically considered to violate these norms, and thus to go against the basic standards of acceptable human behavior. Customary international law evolves in a variety of ways, including through the decisions of regional and international tribunals, and the writings of certain highly skilled legal experts.
It also develops through the work of certain deliberative bodies such as the International Law Commission ILC , a group of legal experts that codifies international law for the United Nations. Several years ago, when the ILC drafted the statute for the International Criminal Court, it included torture as one of the crimes over which the Court would have jurisdiction.
Unfortunately, however, torture was later removed from the list at the strident insistence of the United States. However, it remains the ILC's own view that torture remains a jus cogens violation. Finally, German prosecutors could look to those international treaties that Germany has ratified -- and thus have been incorporated into German law -- when charging Meiwes.
It is therefore unsurprising to find such beliefs equated with cannibals. Cannibalism made a fitting metaphor because it provided a vivid example of utter depravity, but it also framed the situation within a context of lawlessness. Wilson sig. Catholics, in being active in implementing the ordinances of the Pope, employed a method of political meddling that did not befit loyal subjects.
A most detestable sentence […] In comparison whose religion and holinesse, all the impietie that euer was among the Infidels, and all the barbarous cruelty that euer was among the Canibals, may passe henceforth in the Christian world for pure clemencie.
James I sigs. He must not suffer them to escape vnpunished, that maliciously seeke the bringing in of strangers, and the subuersion of the State […] how willing I haue bene and am, to spend more then ordinarie for resistance both of common enemies, and such Caniball traitors. Sutcliffe, The blessings on Mount Garizzim sigs. The excess characteristic of sedition placed the perpetrator outside the bounds of civil society. Fears of lawlessness or factionalism on any level threatened the sovereignty of the monarch; cannibalism became a clear contrast to the just punishments that a king might administer to unruly subjects in a society where balance and measure was projected to an antidote to dangerous unrestraint.
Cannibalism became a means of infusing the usual discourses against sinfulness and disorder with a vivid and striking example of misbehaviour that emphasised the utter horror of rejecting civility. James stressed that any behaviour contrary to his wishes sprang from a self-serving attitude that undermined his desire for domestic peace.
The state-politique taketh care that the hand of violence shall not touch any subiect, and if any man shed the bloud of another, by the man of authoritie his bloud shall be shed. Yea, the tender hearts of true Christian Princes haue prouided against hot-spirited duels, that the image of God may not be destroyed by sudden enraged passions, nor Subiects wound their owne soules by bringing in the price of bloud vpon their owne Families.
Loe sig. The shedding of blood by any but those acting in direct authority from the king was nothing but the acts of cannibals, and Loe explicitly drew a connection between cannibalism and those who did not live like Christians, obedient to their monarch. Feuds were crimes against the body, but also against the king, to whom that body owed unwavering allegiance. The Scottish minister John Colville encouraged missionary activity along the Anglo-Scottish borders, where longstanding disagreements rendered the area prone to feuds and violence.
To these men, the persistence of cruelty and backbiting, slander and prideful passions, was therefore characteristic of the entire realm. James himself, but also counsellors, churchmen, and merchants, increasingly identified cannibal violence with the unofficial and therefore unlawful bloodshed of any who took violence into their own hands.
Heigham sig. It was this knowing , this choice of excessive violence and rejection of temperance, that made poor behaviour not only uncivil but seditious, confirming the rightness of monarchical rule. The civil lawyer John Hayward denounced all those who believed the people alone could maintain stability.
What are you? Those who abandoned religion and fell into hate, spurning the Christian and civic values of an ordered society, fell into miserable conditions without a prince to govern them. The value that many citizens placed on the law provided a contrast to the cultures of vengeance seen to dominate Amerindian tribes.
James praised his subjects for being mostly civil beings, but mirroring the natives through shared uncivil behaviour became the first step towards a greater rejection of English cultural mores that led to disobedience.
Seemingly uncivil manners were the first step in the chain of disobedience that threatened the state, a view that continued to be articulated by churchmen, poets, playwrights, but also policy-makers who saw the problems of authority in Virginia as a concurrent example of the dangers of an unstable body politic.
It is within this context that the hyperbolic but vivid and oft-used cannibal metaphor became so important in Jacobean discourse. Yet it was the seemingly arbitrary and anarchic violence of the cannibal that rendered him so threatening. Though Englishmen employed the trope of cultural relativism in their assessment of violent behaviour, such reflections never denied the state its authority to practice violence through its execution of the law.
The usual tropes in ballads and accounts of hangings indicate just how far the acceptance of violence depended on shared cultural values, where perceptions of justice, cruelty, and law rendered state violence wholly justifiable, and explicitly different to perceptions of Amerindian violence. When Francis Bacon listed the numerous reasons for abstaining from eating human flesh, his main concern was not in an unholy desecration against the body but in the connection between cannibalism and murder.
His interest was not why American natives ate flesh, but why Englishmen abstained from doing so, concluding that since cannibals only ate those they killed, they were automatically categorised as murderers, too. Cannibalism thus involved committing immoral or sinful crimes against the body that extended beyond flesh-consumption. The threat of uncivil behaviour included native Americans, but they extended beyond colonised territories. What the prevalence of cannibal discussions during this time indicate is that James and many other English writers considered the threat of savagery to be a thing performed by disobedient Englishmen as much as by foreign peoples.
The interchangeableness of the two suggests that the question of the impact of the New World on Europe remains an important and under-researched question. Lopez Treason. Benjamin Tichborne to the Privy Council. Calendar of State Papers: Ireland , Hans Claude Hamilton. Chamberlain to Carleton. P ercy , George. Mark Nicholls. The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography Proceedings in the Star Chamber.
Valentine Dale to Lord Burghley. A Confession of Christian Religion. London, STC a. A ristotle. Ernest Baker. Oxford: OUP, B acon , Francis. Sylua Syluarum: or A natural historie in ten centuries. London: STC B ayly , Lewis. The Practice of piety. C olumbus , Christopher. The Four Voyages.
London: Penguin, Colville , John.
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