Image: Day 1, Gaza Tribunal with Penny Green, Susan Akram and Michael Lynk
In late May, the Gaza Tribunal held its first public assembly in Sarajevo and online (through Zoom and Youtube livestreaming). Over the course of 4 days, its three chambers presented expert reports that were interspersed with keynotes, witness testimony from Gaza and a journalists’ roundtable. The assembly was formally opened by the Rector of the International University of Sarajevo, Professor Ahmet Yıldırım, who welcomed us to the city in a spirit of solidarity with the people of Gaza. While Bosnia’s genocide could be spoken of the in past tense, shared experiences seemed to erase the tyranny of distance and of time. In coming together in this city that will be forever marked as a site of atrocity, participants could work collectively against impunity.
The opening session ended with a speech from the Tribunal’s president, Richard Falk. As a seasoned international lawyer and activist, Falk looked back to moments in his own life where international law failures had been most acute. In pivotal periods such as the US invasions of Vietnam or Iraq, peoples’ tribunals had emerged as symbolically powerful practices to counter the moral and legal bankruptcy of formal institutional mechanisms. While Falk lauded the international accountability efforts currently being pursued at the ICC and the ICJ largely through Global South efforts, he had to concede that they had failed to arrest the genocide. With a sense of urgency and gravity then, he concluded by characterising Gaza as the ‘moral challenge of our time’; opening up a space to witness and to reflect on its enormity would be a small act of resistance. Very much seeking to amplify voices from global civil society, Falk suggested that the Gaza Tribunal could counter the Global North’s silence and complicity.
As a member of the Tribunal who zoomed in for these sessions, I want to reflect here on the meaning and the potential of this people’s tribunal both for Palestine and for international law more broadly. After 20 months of slaughter and many frustrated efforts to achieve a ceasefire alongside more long-lasting liberation, it is now de rigueur to academically-agonise over the death of international law under the rubble of Gaza. Yet in writing from a place of privilege, this cannot be our only response. For those millions of people holding on by a thread in Gaza or in the West Bank, even a slither of change might allow them to keep breathing, both physically and figuratively as a people. International law might be a part of this future story that is yet to be written. But what particular contribution can a people’s tribunal make at this moment and for possible future accountability efforts? Does this type of endeavour embody a unique form of legal activism and consciousness that goes beyond formal legal proceedings, political activism or academic workshops? Below, I survey the work of the Gaza Tribunal to reflect on its possible contribution in raising awareness and contributing to redress. Ultimately, I suggest that while the contribution of the Gaza Tribunal is currently modest, its reports and archival materials can provide a unique resource for shaping future research and policy changes. It can also help inform the historical memory of Palestinians as they come to craft their narratives of this moment.
“Peopling” International Law
One of the sessions I valued most was the media roundtable. Here we heard in registers both forensic and deeply personal about the hegemonic framing of Gaza reporting. I was already familiar with Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian’s work on ‘unchilding’, which has explored the erasure of Palestinian childhood under occupation. As Gaza now holds the unenviable moniker of being the world’s most dangerous place to be a child, this prescient notion of ‘unchilding’ has reached its zenith. In this session though, Ezgi Basaran spoke particularly on the media’s framing of Gaza to highlight the related practice of ‘unpeopling’. Through the individual lives reduced to a number, often without photos or a sense of their human connections, Palestinians appear all too often in legacy media as dehumanised factual artefacts or afterthoughts. This is compounded by the headlines deployed which often obscure agency and accountability (‘died’ rather than ‘were murdered’), presenting Palestinians as either unwitting victims of bombs happening to fall from the sky (whose bombs, whose planes, whose parts, whose diplomatic cover?) or as terrorist accomplices.
Such depersonalised and unpeopled approaches of course are also reflective of international law itself. As a discipline and a practice centred on states (and particularly powerful states) as the creators and enforcers of international law, the possibility of capturing the fragility and complexity of a person and a people even in the age of human rights seems as pronounced as ever. This was underscored yet again by the US’s fifth UNSC veto blocking a Gaza ceasefire on 4th June. In denial of overwhelming popular – that is, peoples’ – support for an end to Israel’s onslaught, the prerogative of state power at such moments tries to smash networks of solidarity.
None of this is new of course. Countering such gestures through the creation of people’s tribunals is not new either. Since the first people’s tribunal in London in 1933 that sought to present an alternative account of the Reichstag fire, there have been over 50 people’s tribunals dedicated to a vast array of contemporaneous and historical injustices across the globe. Perhaps best known is the Russell Tribunal created in 1966 to hold the US and its allies accountable for a range of crimes in Vietnam. Comprising well-known intellectuals including Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, the tribunal delivered a searing legal and moral judgment against aggressive, genocidal war. Although it could not halt US policy, it focused opposition to the Vietnam war, especially through its detailed accounts of wartime suffering. This model would go on to inform the writing of the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Peoples in Algiers in 1976 that serves as the basis of the work of the Permanent People’s Tribunal until today.
Every people’s tribunal is unique. We might place each iteration along a spectrum from highly legalised in its procedure and engagement with formal mechanisms to largely-rejectionist of extant laws and transformative in their outlook. At the very least, all people’s tribunals emerge from a deep-set frustration with state-based processes and oftentimes, law. Usually, the aim is to harness this frustration by reinvigorating law to achieve unrealised accountability. This may simply entail reiterations of accepted modes of responsibility, but it may also offer up new ways to think about responsibility, complicity and ethical commitments.
It is hard to measure the effectiveness of such bodies. Take, for instance, the 2015 Women’s Court also convened in Sarajevo. Created by a broad coalition of women’s civil society groups, it provided a space for women – often for the first time – to recount their experiences during the war. Sometimes this was done in a legally legible way, but sometimes it wasn’t. There are no clear legal effects that we can now point to, but for those women involved, it was a vital space of solidarity and a particularly focussed form of mobilising. By contrast, the Tokyo Women’s Tribunal with its impressively doctrinal judgment has since been cited by the ILO’s Committee of Experts. While Japan did not shift its official stance, the findings of the Tribunal were a valuable tool in later litigation efforts in Japan itself as well as the Philippines, South Korea and the United States. Perhaps the best type of model for a people’s tribunal then would be one that employs its own procedural innovations to push at hegemonic understandings of international law but only to such a point that formal institutions would still seek to learn from their alternative accounts.
The Gaza Tribunal itself exemplifies these challenges regarding procedure, legitimacy, its claims to representation and the reach of its influence. While presentations gestured many times to formal, state-based accountability mechanisms as important dimensions for possible redress, they were never understood as ends in themselves. For example, there was no need to hesitate or prevaricate over who has the authority to determine the existence of genocide, such as by waiting deferentially for the ICJ’s determination on the merits in the South Africa v Israel case. The Gaza Tribunal was not prepared to follow the ‘presumption of state innocence’ as is granted to the individual within the ‘standard penal accountability paradigm’. Instead, members of the Tribunal felt comfortable and capable of declaring the commission of genocide based on the extensive evidence that it and other civil society actors have already amassed. Trying to generate a more capacious reading of justice for Gaza entails a far broader and more variegated inquiry into past and contemporaneous wrongs. Chamber 3 in particular tried to push at legalistic strictures by explaining how we cannot understand Gaza today without a wider appreciation of historical and sociological patterns of settler colonialism. As it stood, there was not enough of an attempt to integrate legalistic analyses with these more expansive readings. This was the first real gathering though and more is needed. The challenge will be to see then how the Tribunal can weave together these strands to advance a rigorous rendering of responsibility that convincingly pushes beyond standard approaches to individual criminal and state-based models.
The law itself though is also ripe for reconfiguring and reimagining at this moment. International law was not simply invoked in a didactic, positivistic fashion as a weapon of the weak. A far more nuanced and TWAIL-inflected account of international law recognised both its hegemonic qualities and its counter-hegemonic potential. This was most pronounced in the presentations by Richard Falk and Craig Mokhiber, a former UN lawyer. Other presentations pushed at the jurisprudential parameters of our field by calling into question established normative silos. For example, Maryam Jamshidi constructed a carefully detailed account of specific Israeli wrongs under IHL as a way to make her broader point about the commission of genocide. As in the case of the ICJ’s 2024 advisory opinion which used individuated IHRL and IHL violations to build its finding on breaches of the peremptory norms against the use of force and the right to self-determination, here, Jamshidi drew on IHL for a broader genocide argument. She painstakingly set up core IHL principles and their systematic transgression by Israel over the course of its campaign in Gaza to demonstrate a concerted policy of destruction, depopulation and evisceration of the conditions of life in Gaza (as a reference to Article 2(c) of the Genocide Convention). She used this then to suggest that ‘war makes genocide permissible’. Similarly, in his overview of the limited jurisprudence on apartheid as a crime against humanity, Victor Kattan suggested that we might use this moment to rethink the relationship between the crimes of apartheid and genocide.
“It’s going be a long and difficult day”
A crucial dimension in ‘peopling’ international law is to defer not only to experts in their non-aligned individual capacities, but to ordinary people themselves. This tends to centre on more expansive and less-constrained survivor testimony than is permitted in standard criminal trials such as was the case for the Bosnian Women’s Court. Such testimonies serve an important archival function in providing richer and more granular accounts of past wrongs.
The Gaza Tribunal too incorporated the voices of Palestinians themselves from Gaza through the reading of their translated testimonies and through video and audio recordings. Listening to these accounts not only provoked the anticipated responses of despair and anger, but also, of confusion. There was a profound dissonance in the room. We heard of harrowing details about a particular moment on a particular day for a particular individual. Yet sometimes these accounts ended with no follow-up information. What had since happened to this person and their loved ones? Sipping on my tea as I heard these testimonies drenched in growing hunger and fear, how could I link them to the abstract presentations I had just heard on the Genocide Convention or the UN Charter? Was international law of any value at such moments? While the Gaza Tribunal had peopled this public assembly with the disembodied yet visceral renderings of life in Gaza, there was no attempt to make connections between legal doctrine or historical evaluation and individual testimonies. Instead, these voices were left hanging, waiting for an answer. Perhaps this will transpire with future accountability efforts.
Such testimonies as well as those presentations offered by Gazan doctors and researchers over the four days grounded the Tribunal and made it impossible to forget its main purpose of remembering and respecting as a way to achieve responsibility and redress for Gaza and for the Palestinian people as a whole. As a Gazan journalist and researcher, Ramzy Baroud captured this most eloquently when he called on Palestinians to be trusted in forging their own discourse. This requires working with global consciousness, but ultimately, it means Palestinians themselves must be able to liberate their own discourse. In particular, he stressed the singularly powerful resonance of sumud (steadfastness) as a culture and as a form of resistance that is being practiced now as Palestinians hold on to their land in the face of their annihilation.
This spirit of defiance and strength sustained the proceedings which ended with the announcement of the Sarajevo Declaration. The text speaks in outraged tones with a sense of urgency and energy. It is grounded fiercely in the present moment of crisis, but gestures to its lineage of earlier civil society organising and activism. In the wake of this public assembly and the release of the Sarajevo Declaration, conditions in Gaza have only worsened, but they now sit alongside ever-growing awareness and outrage.
The work of the Gaza Tribunal is not finished. It will convene again later this year in Istanbul. At such a moment, no people’s tribunal is enough in and of itself to end such suffering, but it at least shows us flashes of hope, resistance and innovative forms of accountability through international law as rendered in more expansive and energetic registers. At its core, the Gaza Tribunal aims to serve as a strategically important link between academia, other evidence gathering initiatives, legal advocacy, civil society activism and more formalised contemporaneous accountability efforts especially at the ICC and the ICJ. To do this effectively though, its work needs to resonate and to register with a wider audience that is both Palestinian and global. Longer term and as per other civil society accountability efforts such as we have seen in Syria and Ukraine, its dedicated archive of witness and expert testimony could serve as a unique and valuable resource if and when opportunities arise. Yet, the test of its success rests not only on its ability to catalyse legal change directly, but to serve as a site of information and consciousness-raising for people around the world to inform themselves about the nature of the Gaza genocide, whether through highly personalised witness testimonies, in sweeping historical appraisals or as critiques of extant law and legal procedure. The challenge will be to bring these strands together and to amplify its findings through a compelling and rigorous public assembly at Istanbul.
