Politics & Power Quote by Jacques Verges

Verges is doing what he did best: turning the courtroom into an indictment of the court itself. The sentence sounds clumsy in English, but the strategy is razor-clean. He’s not arguing innocence; he’s arguing process. “I am looking for a document” is the lawyer’s minimalist weapon: a demand for paper, procedure, something verifiable. By foregrounding what’s missing, he frames the prosecution as theater staged by power, not law.

The subtext is pure Verges: the “accusation” isn’t legal, it’s political. He draws a sharp line between evidence and rumor, then immediately contaminates the rumor by naming its authors: “political leaders of the coalition,” “his enemies.” That repetition matters. It paints a chorus, not a case, and suggests motive before the state even gets to facts. In a few strokes, the defendant becomes less a person than a proxy in a struggle between factions.

Then he lands the real charge: not that the defendant is guilty, but that the system is already pre-committed to death. “That he deserves to be killed” is deliberately blunt, almost primitive, because it drags the conversation from jurisprudence to blood. Verges’s intent is to force the audience - judge, press, public - to notice the slide from indictment to execution, from due process to vengeance. It’s courtroom jujitsu: if the state can’t produce the document, Verges implies, what it’s really producing is a scapegoat.