What can be done when governmental and international Tribunals fail to address massive violations of human rights?
The Global Campus - Arab World with the support of Regina Menachery Paulose brought together leading practitioners and international experts to discuss their experience and insights in People’s Tribunals quest to advance justice and combat impunity.Panelists
Hamid Sabi
is a London-based Iranian lawyer with an international practice in human rights, arbitration and litigation. He has worked extensively on and in People’s Tribunals and has served on the Aban Tribunal (Iran), and the on-going Uyghur Tribunal (China).
Nursyahbani Katjasungkana
is a human rights lawyer and has been working for 30 years with several NGOs focusing on human and women's rights organizations and environmental issues. She was a director of the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute and a President of the Indonesian Environmental Forum (WALHI)
Saskia Wieringa
is an honorary Emeritus Professor at the University of Amsterdam. She is also the co-founder of the Kartini Asia Network. She is a human rights activist and genocide researcher. She has published widely on sexual politics in Indonesia, women’s empowerment and heteronormativity in Asia.
Martin Elliott
is professor of cardiothoracic surgery at University College London. He has practised at Great Ormond Street Hospital since 1984, and been a thoracic transplant specialist since 1988. Widely published, he is a non-Executive Director at the Royal Marsden Hospital London and Emeritus Gresham Professor of Physic.
Regina Paulose
is an American international criminal law attorney. She has recently edited an authoritative book on citizen tribunals: People’s Tribunals, Human Rights and the Law. Searching for Justice, published by Routledge (2020)
Examples on People’s Tribunals
“People’s Tribunals are independent, peaceful, grassroots movements, created by members of civil society, to address impunity that is associated with ongoing or past atrocities. As such, they offer society an alternative history and create a space for healing and reconciliation to take place that may otherwise be stifled by political agendas and legal technicalities. Since the 1960’s, People’s Tribunals have grown and developed to address many kinds of situations, from genocide to environmental degradation”. People’s Tribunals, Human Rights and the Law. Searching for Justice, Regina Menachery Paulose (ed.), Routledge, London 2020. In the panel organised within the Arab master’s programme in Democracy and Human Rights, four tribunals were examined.
The Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan
The Tribunal was established in The Hague, the Netherlands in December 2000, to ensure some form of accountability for the former 'comfort women,' that had been forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. It was organised by an asian civil society network called Violence Against Women in War-Network Japan (VAWW-NET Japan)
The International People’s Tribunal for 1965 and the Indonesian Genocide
The International People’s Tribunal was held in The Hague, the Netherlands in 2015, to commemorate and look into the mass killings in Indonesia (1965-1966), fifty years since they started.
The China Tribunal
The Tribunal was established in London in 2018 to look into “the forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China”. It had been initiated by the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC), an international not for profit organisation, with headquarters in Australia
The Uyghur Tribunal
The tribunal was launched in September 2020 with assistance from a non-governmental organisation, the Coalition for Genocide Response, following a request by the World Uyghur Congress to Sir Geoffrey Nice QC to establish and chair an independent people’s tribunal to investigate “ongoing atrocities and possible Genocide’ against the Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Turkic Muslim Populations”.