In this article, I attend to two forms of hearings (or nonhearings) in two distinctive courts of law, both involving the persecution of Iranian dissidents in the 1980s. Drawing on my ethnographic and archival research, inside and outside of Iran, I ponder the conditions of possibility of confessions/testimonies and their affects and after‐lives. The first case involves the Islamic Republic's televised trials of a group of leftist prisoners. The second one is a symbolic court in The Hague, known as the Iran Tribunal, organized by some dissidents in diaspora, where witnesses testified against the Iranian regime. I meditate on the relationship between these two different spaces of the “law” in their differing milieus, and the divergent modes of speaking and hearing they render possible or impossible. I contemplate the kinds of ethical subjectivities they produce or shatter and reflect on the conditions and modes of speaking and hearing in relation to these topographies of coercive and sympathetic courts.

中文翻译：

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见证人种志和作为见证人种志：两次法庭听证会的地形

在本文中，我将在两个独特的法院参加两种形式的听证会（或非听证会），都涉及1980年代对伊朗持不同政见者的迫害。利用我在伊朗境内外的人种志和档案研究，我思考了供认/作证的可能性条件及其影响和来世。第一个案件涉及伊斯兰共和国对一群左派囚犯进行的电视审判。第二个法庭是在海牙的一个象征性法庭，称为伊朗法庭，由散居在国外的一些持不同政见者组织，证人作证反对伊朗政权。我沉思着“法律”的这两个不同空间在不同环境中的关系，以及它们不同的说话和听觉方式使之成为可能或不可能。