Private Tribunals of Conscience
Their History and Why They Matter
Ralph Fucetola, JD
Support the Efforts of the Tribunals
www.MarshallsofConscience.com
Tribunals of Conscience and Crimes Against Humanity
Over the past century and more, various
private Tribunals of Conscience have focused the moral judgment of humanity in situations
where official bodies have either failed to hold violators of human rights to
account or have been themselves the perpetrators of horrific acts that shock
the conscience.
These nongovernmental, private
expressive associations must be distinguished from international legal
tribunals, such as the Nuremberg Tribunals and the International
Court of Justice, which are examples of multinational courts established by
governments under international law to try cases of making war and of war
crimes.
International Criminal Tribunals
Discussing the impact of International
Criminal Tribunals, a recent paper from the Netherlands noted,
“The idea that a ruler’s power cannot be
absolute, that there must be standards beyond the ruler to protect his
citizens, has become the foundation stone of international human rights law.
But the idea of international criminal law, and international criminal
tribunals, goes a step further. In the extreme case where the ruler commits or
condones crimes against his people, it takes not only the formulation of norms,
but also the administration of punitive justice out of his hands and up to the
international level, even to the point where he himself can be tried on
criminal charges. . . .
Yet the symbolic power of international criminal tribunals may be
far greater than their legal authority and capacity would suggest. In the cases
of Georgia and Kenya, the threat of an ICC investigation appears to be spurring
national investigations. Above all, in the former Yugoslavia and in the situations
the ICC is currently investigating, the existence of the investigations has
given local civil society actors room to discuss "difficult subjects"
related to the recent past, such as the occurrence of massacres, the use of
mass rape as a political instrument, the use of child-soldiers, and the issue
of accountability in whatever shape.” [1]
Crimes Against Humanity
International Law is ambiguous with
regard to Crimes Against Humanity (CAHs).
“Unlike
genocide and war crimes, which have been widely recognized and prohibited in
international criminal law since the establishment of the Nuremberg
principles, there has never been a comprehensive convention on crimes
against humanity, even though such crimes are continuously perpetrated
worldwide in numerous conflicts and crises. There are eleven
international texts defining crimes against humanity, but they all differ
slightly as to their definition of that crime and its legal elements.” [2]
While the phrase “Crimes Against
Humanity” (Class C Charges) was used in the post-World War II imposition of
“victors justice” against CAH perpetrators on the losing side, “the charge of
crimes against peace was a prerequisite to prosecution—only those individuals
whose crimes included crimes against peace could be prosecuted by the Tribunal.
In the event, no [independent] Class C charges were heard in Tokyo...” [3]
The failure of governments to respond to public concerns regarding
CAH necessitates and justifies private persons constituting themselves into
private associations for the purpose of condemning violations of basic humane
standards.
Before the earliest Tribunals of
Conscience there were several important international campaigns which contained
elements later developed by the Tribunals.
These include campaigns against slavery which started even before the
beginning of the 19th Century. Often led by concerns of conscience,
by religious libertarians such as the Quakers, the anti-slavery movement
included a major element of the Tribunals:
the public condemnation of acts seen as immoral. [4]
Similarly, private commissions of
investigation were established to oppose the horrific abuses in the Congo
during the early 19th Century when that territory was a personal
fiefdom of the King of the Belgians.
Slavery enforced by brutalities, including dismemberment, was widely
condemned and various private campaigns, often led by clergy, investigated and
condemned the violations of humanitarian standards. It was one of those campaigns where the phrase
“Crimes Against Humanity” was first used. [5] Later the phrase was used in
reference to the genocide against Armenians by the Ottoman Empire. [6]
Tribunals of Conscience
Various nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs) have sought to define “Tribunals of Conscience”.
The National Lawyers Guild, for example,
has posited the following:
“A Tribunal
of Conscience is a People’s Tribunal. Such tribunals date back more than six
decades to the era of the Russell Tribunal on US war crimes in Viet Nam and the
Universal Declaration of the Rights of People (Algiers, 1976). They provide an
alternative forum for those who find no recourse in the formal institutions of
the state or the international community. They are the place where the people
judge the crimes of the state, not where the state judges the people.” [7]
Perhaps the earliest self-denoted
Tribunal of Conscience was that convoked by B. Russell and J-P. Sartre
regarding the War in Vietnam, in 1966.
After two public sessions in Europe the Tribunal published a strong condemnation
of United States' actions in Vietnam in 1967.
Russel quoted Robert H. Jackson, the
Chief Nuremberg Prosecutor, in justification of the establishment of the
Tribunal:
“If certain
acts and violations of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United
States does them or whether Germany does them. We are not prepared to lay down
a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have
invoked against us.” — Justice Robert H. Jackson [8]
The Russel/Sartre Tribunal encouraged
subsequent private efforts:
“Additional tribunals have
been conducted in the following decades on the same model, using the
denomination Russell Tribunal. E.g., The Russell Tribunal on Latin
America focused on human rights violations in the military dictatorships of Argentina
and Brazil (Rome, 1973), on Chile's military coup d'état (Rome, 1974–76), on
the situation of Human Rights in Germany (1978), on the Threat of Indigenous
Peoples of America (1982), on Human Rights in Psychiatry (Berlin, 2001), on
Iraq (Brussels, 2004), and on Palestine (Barcelona, 2009–12).” [9]
These efforts have also continued beyond the Russel/Sartre model. The
“Permanent Peoples' Tribunal was established at the behest of a member of the
Senate of Italy in Bologna in the late 1970s.
It has held 46 sessions regarding separate Crimes Against Humanity over
the ensuing decades. [10] These sessions have reviewed situations involving
CAHs primarily against peoples who are not recognized as “nations”, such as the
population of Western Sahara or the Kurds, who live in several Middle Eastern nations.
Recent
Developments
Other Tribunals of Conscience
have included the 2009 Agent Orange Tribunal of the International Democratic
Lawyers Association [11]; the 2020 Belmarish Tribunal regarding the persecution
of Julian Assange [12]; and the 2019 China Tribunal which states:
“The China Tribunal is an
independent people’s tribunal established to inquire into forced organ
harvesting from, amongst others, prisoners of conscience in China and to
investigate what criminal offences, if any, have been committed by state or
state-approved bodies, organisations or individuals in China that may have
engaged in forced organ harvesting. “ [13]
During the 2020-2021 period of
the “Declared Pandemic” the Natural and Common Law Tribunal for Public
Health and Justice was established to hold the
perpetrators of what the Tribunal found to be the “Genocidal Technologies
Pandemic” accountable. It entered a
formal judgment against various state-actors, politicians, businesses and NGOs
for their various roles in triggering the false-flag “pandemic” and rushing
“unavoidably unsafe” vaccines, including novel class of “gene altering”
injections into production and deployment. [14]
Humanity
Benefits from Tribunals of Conscience
“What”, the skeptic may ask, “is
the value of private Tribunals of Conscience to humanity?”
We live in a world where the
promise of global peace and prosperity has become a distortion used to empower
globalist elites with their demonstrated eugenocidal agenda (most recently,
through the Declared COVID Pandemic), where relations among nation-states
resemble the brutal behavior of thugs -- a true Hobbesian international order.
The new religion of this world is Statism, the worship of the institutions of
the States, including their judicial institutions and administrative indiscretions.
As the lack of intellectual
viability of Statism in its various racial, religious, national, international,
bureaucratic, imperialist and other forms becomes increasingly exposed and
become, perhaps, increasingly irrelevant in an economically globalized,
blockchain-enabled, post-singularity world, an alternative to state-sponsored
"justice" is needed.
The juridical subjects of
International Law, "International Actors," include nation-states
(even micro-states like the Vatican), a certain few private associations (like
the Red Cross or Sovereign Knights of Malta), and international agencies like
the UN along with its associated institutions (such as certain privileged NGOs
and "specialized agencies" -- WHO and FAO, for example). Not included
in this list are actual private persons, natural or cultural Nations, even
juridical persons such as private associations and registered corporations.
The humans and human
organizations with which we usually interact are missing from the globalist
structure of international relations.
We individuals do not exist in
the currently dominant Statist view of international law.
In the eyes of Globalist
International Actors, we real people and our private associations are little
more than disregarded entities. This state of affairs is entirely
unsatisfactory to humane individuals.
Consider the long march of
human history and how treating individual humans as objects led us to endless
millennia of Statist imperial warfare, culminating the 20th Century's killing
fields and nuclear incinerations.
Consider the historic role of
Statism in the imposition of what libertarian philosopher and lawyer Lysander
Spooner saw as the Great Monopolies: the horror of slavery, vicious state
churches, the legal "incapacities of women" and the King's trade
monopolies – all Statist institutions which have repeatedly perpetrated Crimes
Against Humanity.
How can humanity trust the very
Statist institutions which have so violated humane standards, by committing
Crimes Against Humanity to exact meaningful justice for their own misdeeds, no
matter how egregious?
Even as the vicious old
concepts, chattel slavery, religious and racial bigotry, institutionalized
inequality of women and various others, have become anathema to civilized
people, the very concept a "sovereign" State, not subject to the same
rule of law that applies to private persons, must also be rejected. States and
their political elites must be subject to true Justice or there is no Justice.
Clearly, that justice will not
come from the very source of the criminality. Private persons of conscience must take the
lead to expose and publicly condemn Crimes Against Humanity. This is the role, which is of inestimable
value to humanity, of Private Tribunals of Conscience.
----------------
[1] https://www.academia.edu/4171788/International_Criminal_Tribunals
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_against_humanity
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Military_Tribunal_for_the_Far_East#Charges
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_against_humanity#Abolition_of_the_slave_trade
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_against_humanity#First_use
[6] https://www.armenian-genocide.org/Affirmation.160/current_category.7/affirmation_detail.html
[7] www.inquirycommission.org / https://www.nlginternational.org/report/Final_Preliminary_ITC_Verdict.pdf
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Tribunal
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Tribunal#Subsequent_Tribunals
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_Peoples%27_Tribunal#List_of_sessions
[11] https://vn-agentorange.org/edmaterials/paris_2009_tribunal_decision_2.15.10.pdf
[12] https://popularresistance.org/the-belmarsh-tribunal/
[13] https://chinatribunal.com/
[14] http://www.peaceinspace.org
Also to be posted at:
International
Journal of Natural Health, Science and Policy
http://www.inhere.org/international-journal-of-nhsp/
