Magazine Issue 11: The Law / When people judge - the permanent peoples' tribunal

Magazine Issue 11 Summer 2000

When People Judge: The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal

How is it that in a global society apparently committed to the dignity and worth of the human person as the basis upon which all political-legal orders are said to be judged, there still persists the widespread and flagrant abuse, subjugation and impoverishment of human populations? Jayan Nayar airs the possibility of countering this situation with a ‘people’s legality’.

We are all familiar with the statements of abhorrence to human rights violations that are committed by tyrannical regimes, where the full force of international legal rhetoric is employed to demonstrate the commitments of ‘civilisation’ to the universal well-being of humanity. Yet many seem quite content to regard as acceptable the daily sufferings of communities and individuals that result from the dictates of ‘normal’ economic activities. The law of the world apparently is that the condition of human lives stands subject to the requirements of economic profit. This law is promoted as both natural and good.

This is the context within which we are to negotiate for spaces for justice in order that humanity may truly be able to claim for itself the quality of humaneness. And we are sought to be convinced that the ‘law’ can be the site of this struggle: its terrain supposedly neutral, our ability to engage with it alone determining our success in ensuring that the ‘minor derogations’ within an otherwise sound ordering of society as a conglomeration of profit-motivated actors are rectified. These minor derogations, however, represent the life-experience of the majority of the human population.

The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal
The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) grew out of this basic realisation, that dominant law is anything but neutral. Its roots lie in the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal and the anti-imperialist movement which produced the Algiers Declaration on the Rights of Peoples, 1976. This Declaration explicitly set out demands of a people’s legality: "May all those who, throughout the world, are fighting the great battle… for the freedom of all peoples, find in this Declaration the assurance of the legitimacy of their struggle."1

Underlying the efforts of the PPT is a refusal to accept the power of law to apparently negate, through a judgement of denial2, the suffering of peoples by naming violence as mere misfortune. It seeks to construct an alternative discourse of human wrongs which locates the infliction of wrongs not simply as an ‘acute’ event of violence - with an identifiable deviant perpetrator and an identifiable subject victim - but as a ‘chronic’ condition of systematic, structural violation resulting in communities of suffering.3

The Tribunal was born out of a historical movement of peoples’ efforts which gained strength from the conviction that the dominant legality of an imperialist, corporate-controlled world order, despite all its rhetoric of human rights and justice, serves to keep unheard the voicings of truths of suffering. The aim of the PPT is to break this ‘crime of silence’ that is the prevailing mechanism by which the imperialistic world political and economic order is maintained.4 It aims to return to violated peoples their right to judge wrongs.

But by what authority does it exist? By the authority of peoples’ judgement whose life experiences constitute the substance of the alternative judgements and legal articulations that it seeks to develop. Its legitimacy, neither sanctioned by international law-making institutions, nor by the State, stands independently as a source of ‘truth’ for communities in struggle.5 Thus its enforcement relies not upon the technical pronouncements of dominant legality, but rather, through the politics of social action and struggle.

Recent sessions of the Tribunal have been concerned with the structural, transnational violence that is increasingly perpetrated by corporate actors in the context of globalisation. This greater scrutiny of transnational and structural violence is reflected in the focus of recent Tribunal sessions:

on the wrongs resulting from industrial hazards (1994)
on the Chernobyl nuclear ‘accident’ (1996)
on the violations committed by the international garment industries (1998)
on the crimes committed by the French oil/energy corporation Elf-Aquitaine in collusion with the French state in the former territories of French colonial rule (1999).

The PPT provides recognition and solidarity , allowing communities of the violated, which have been marginalised by dominant law into the spaces of public amnesia, to reclaim their judgements of violation and to demand public hearing.

An Evolving Peoples’ Tribunal
The current context of the colonising force of the corporate appropriation of law and legal processes makes it vital for broad participation in evolving the Tribunal to meet the challenges of reclaiming law, so that it serves those who are subject to violence and victimisation. This is an ongoing process. The following questions could serve as a guide for discussions towards this end:

What are the most important contributions that can be made by a process that is initiated by the PPT towards effecting a peoples’ legality that is derived from judgements of the victimised? Critical to this is the dual challenge to both direct public attention to the realities of a global political economy in which the violence of corporate wrongs is pervasive, and to reassert solidarity and assistance to communities of resistance to these corporate activities.
How can this aim best be achieved in a sustained and inclusive manner so as to amplify the voices of the violated to the maximum extent possible so as to effect a peoples’ legality which transforms judgements of ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’?
The voices and experiences of people themselves must serve as the primary source of ‘law’. All other specialist support groups - lawyers, the media, politicians, economists, and others – can build upon this primary articulation of judgement and legality.

In this connection, there is an urgent need to collect and disseminate the thus far disparate articulations of peoples’ legality – the statements, declarations, charters and the like which are the outcomes of activist and peoples’ mobilisation – in order that a body of ‘law’ may be developed. Let this alternative language of law and judgement then stand as a direct standard by which all the words and actions of dominant legal institutions – their Codes of Conduct, Social Charters, Statements of Policy – can be judged. And so they will be judged.

For further background on the Permanent People’s Tribunal and details of its current proceedings against Union Carbide, Rio Tinto and Monsanto see the website of Lelio Basso International Foundation for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples
www.grisnet.it/filb/tribu%20eng.html

Footnotes
[1] see Preamble, Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples (Algiers 1976)
[2] a ‘judgement of denial’ may take two forms. First, the denial of access to a legal forum of judgement. These range from the simple impediment of the lack of resources to bring an effective legal claim to the more sophisticated mechanism of exclusion through the doctrine of 'forum non conveniens' - jurisdictional inappropriateness. Second, through failing to satisfy the strict evidentiary and causational tests imposed by law in order to transform the assumption of misfortune into the naming of violation.
[3] Contrary to the neat categorisation of ‘crimes’ as events, isolated from the wider relational contexts of human existence, human experience of wrongs reveal structures of victimisation which precede, frame and flow on from events of violence.
[4] The expression ‘the crime of silence’ was first used by Bertrand Russel to describe the nature of the capture of truth by the imperialistic forces. Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, 1971, at http://www.homeusers.prestel.co.uk/littleton/v1!!cho1.htm, p. 1, visited on 1.3.99.
[5] "The Algiers Declaration of the Rights of Peoples", in R. Falk, Human Rights and State Sovereignty, 1991, p. 184, at pp. 192-3.
[6] This ‘solidarity role’ of the PPT was explicitly recognised by one of the representatives of victim communities during the PPT session on The French State, Elf-Aquitaine and Human Rights Violations in Francophone Africa, held in Paris, France, May 1999. He stressed that the Tribunal provided, for the first time, the forum for telling of narratives of suffering and a support network of solidarity groups.