ABSTRACT It has long been recognised that the right to silence ‘caution’ is difficult to communicate, particularly with some Aboriginal suspects. In a landmark 1976 decision Anunga, the Northern Territory Supreme Court provided guidelines about how police should explain the caution to Aboriginal suspects. As a result, cautions often develop into conversations where police explain the right and test understanding of it. The caution has also been translated into Aboriginal languages, revealing further understandings of its meaning. However, despite strenuous attempts to communicate the caution, it remains confusing for some people. This article reports on linguistic analysis of actual language used to talk about the caution, identifying several ways that communication fails, and revealing more questions than answers about what the caution means. It then argues that policies underlying the caution, and the history of the caution text, are not clear enough to resolve questions about what the caution is supposed to mean and achieve. The caution policy unfortunately creates the appearance of fairness while systematically disadvantaging some Aboriginal (and other) suspects who are partial speakers of standard English and/or not familiar with settler Australian legal culture.

中文翻译：

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解释 Anunga 下的沉默权：40 年的语言政策

摘要 人们早就认识到，保持沉默“谨慎”的权利很难沟通，尤其是与一些土著嫌疑人。在 1976 年具有里程碑意义的 Anunga 判决中，北领地最高法院提供了关于警方应如何向土著嫌疑人解释警告的指导方针。结果，警告经常发展成警察解释权利并测试对权利的理解的对话。警告也被翻译成土著语言，揭示了对其含义的进一步理解。然而，尽管努力传达警告，但对一些人来说仍然令人困惑。本文报告了对用于谈论警告的实际语言的语言分析，确定了沟通失败的几种方式，并揭示了关于警告意味着什么的问题多于答案。然后，它争辩说，警告背后的政策以及警告文本的历史还不够清楚，无法解决有关警告应该意味着什么和实现什么的问题。不幸的是，谨慎政策造成了公平的表象，同时系统地使一些原住民（和其他）嫌疑人处于不利地位，这些嫌疑人是部分讲标准英语和/或不熟悉定居者澳大利亚法律文化的人。