The Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, had barely assumed his duties, when the United Nations Secretariat requested to withhold a report, to which I participated in its drafting – along a group of Arab intellectuals and researchers – thus, under the supervision of Dr. Rima Khalaf, Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of ESCWA. The report was entitled “Injustice in the Arab World and the Way to Justice.” Indeed, it was removed from the organization’s website one day after it was published in December 2016.
As if this scandal did not suffice, a second report narrated by researchers Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley entitled “Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid” was as well removed from the ESCWA website, after Secretary-General Guterres instructed Dr. Khalaf to withdraw it from the website. She resigned on March 17, 2017.
Both reports were printed in thousands of copies and in many international languages, and became some of the most important references on their subject. Global civil society and rights and justice’s defenders no longer need this “header” to make their voices heard to the world.
Today, and so that we do not stand in a moment of inactivity imposed by the balance of power that has chosen to side with criminals and murderers, do we lack the initiative for an international civil court of conscience? not only to record testimonies and document the tragedies of the “Holocaust of the Century,” but also to put all the negligent and accomplices in the institutions of international justice under investigation?
October 7, 2023, entered history faster than its makers expected, and with the occupation choosing to respond with the law of retaliation and collective punishment, the permissible Palestinian blood marked the end of an entire historical era, an era in which Jean-Paul Sartre would go out in protest to prevent “throwing the Jews into the sea,” as he declared before the 1967 war, classifying a Palestinian who is waging a national liberation war as a terrorist, and publishing paid advertisements refusing François Mitterrand to receive President Yasser Arafat because “his hands are stained with Jewish blood.” The editor-in-chief of “Les temps modernes” devoted the rest of his life to produce a film about “Shoah”, as a historical documentation of the holocaust in which no Arab or Kurd participated, nor than colored or one Muslim. He also produced the film “Tsahal,” which glorifies the Israeli army as “the most moral in the world,” as he described his film work in several interviews. People have rediscovered the book of Ilan Halevi, the Israeli who requested Palestinian citizenship: “Under Israel, The Palestine”, and are asking questions about the greatest desecration of global public consciousness that the Palestinian people have ever been subjected to. The international Zionist lobby is now forced to intervene blatantly and openly with the major news agencies in order to avoid words that are forbidden to an entire people, such as “freedom”, “national liberation”, “the right to self-determination” …etc.
Despite the tears of pain over what we see around us, we observe today an awakening of conscience and a desire for justice in Palestine among the youth and free people of the world on various continents. Who would have imagined a few months ago that the Buddhist monk who would burn himself in protest against the burning of the Vietnamese with napalm, or the Bouazizi who blew up the swampy stability of the cold dictatorship in Tunisia, would this time be an American military pilot who would burn himself in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington?
We are living at the end of an era, the end of series in which history was written with the logic of a victor in a global war, victorious not only in the military and economic sense, but also in the moral and ethical sense of defining good and evil, right and wrong, aggression and the responsibility of intervention, terrorist population and nice people… and it is our duty to reconsider with all what was imposed on us by force from the Security Council and its veto, to NATO and its declared and latent goals.
Perhaps the Palestinian issue, in this context, provides a stark example of the injustices and crimes that occurred, and how they were covered up and obscured by a global system that considered the last expression of the apartheid system on our planet, and the last long-standing practices of colonialism and settlement, as necessity: “If it did not exist, it would be our duty to create it.” (Joe Biden).
International justice hangs in the balance
The term “international justice” was largely used in the twentieth century, first from the “Permanent Court of International Justice”, which accompanied the League of Nations. Since its establishment in 1920 and its commencement of work in 1922, it has included judges from member states and non-member states of the League of Nations. The court was restructured in 1945 and was given the name “International Court of Justice,” its statute was considered part of the United Nations Charter.
The international tribunals established by the Allies after the end of World War II (the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals) were not subject to the rules of work of the Permanent Court of International Justice or its successor, the ICJ, but rather to the logic of the victorious parties in the war, and were in every sense of the word military, exceptional and exclusive to the Allied countries. This unilateral behavior of “winners”, formed the original sin of the global justice post World War II, the relationship between what would become the competence of the universal judiciary and the supreme executive authority, represented by the Security Council. With the establishment of the Security Council and granting its permanent member states what was called “veto power”. The Security Council made judicial, executive, and legislative powers dependent on the authority of those with veto power.
This anomaly was clear in several cases, one of more significant the Contra Affair: The government of Nicaragua had charged the United States with breaking international law by supporting a violent rebellion and mining Nicaraguan harbors during the 1980s Contra War. The ICJ found in its verdict of June 1986 that the United States was “in breach of its obligations under customary international law not to use force against another State,” “not to intervene in its affairs”, “not to violate its sovereignty”, and “not to interrupt peaceful maritime commerce.”[1] Even though Washington had long time ago agreed to compulsory jurisdiction by the Court, the US refused to participate in most of the proceedings, refused to recognize its decision, and refused to settle the compensations and penalties. The government of Nicaragua then referred the ruling to the Security Council, asking for relief. In July and then in October 1986, the Council had two debates on Nicaragua issue and endorsed two resolutions enforcing the Court’s decision. The resolutions were both supported by eleven votes—a solid majority. There were three abstentions, including the UK and France, who evidently did not want to vote against their ally-in-chief. The United States cast the sole negative vote—a veto.[2] The veto served as a reminder to the Court that it has subsidiary status under the Council’s veto-regime and especially that it is subject to the will of the Council’s most powerful member[3].
This limited the powers of the International Court of Justice, especially in important and sensitive cases affecting one of the P5. A large civil and judicial movement evolved for an independent international criminal court. Consequently, a large global civil coalition was created in the 1990th for that purpose. The Security Council tried to put this movement under the Security Council control by the establishment of ad hoc tribunals in Ex-Yugoslavia and Rwanda. However, the marches for an international Criminal Court took over these ad-hoc judiciaries.
Establishing an international criminal court
Following years of negotiation, aimed at establishing a permanent international tribunal to prosecute individuals accused of genocide and other serious international crimes, such as crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression, the United Nations General Assembly convened a five-week diplomatic conference in Rome in June 1998 “to finalize and adopt a convention on the establishment of an international criminal court“.
The final wording of the preamble to the Rome Treaty could only reflect the internal balance of power in the conference and the maneuvers of the delegations, on the one hand, and the necessity of the supporters of the International Criminal Court, who are the majority, to make many concessions in order to reach a consensus that would allow the court to come into existence, on the other hand. This is evident from the fact that the formula in which the treaty was issued remains in a middle zone between those who support the establishment of a strong court, with broad powers and a large degree of independence, that is also the position of non-governmental organizations, and those who support the establishment of a weak court, subject to the control of the Security Council and the realities of the multilateral system and the balance of power operating within it, including the “right” to veto. It gives the state/nation and its principle of sovereignty primacy over individuals and their human rights. If we were to examine, we would find that those who object to the idea of establishing an international court that would be the highest judicial authority in cases related to major sins, or the position of those who want a court devoid of any practical content, we find that they actually place the primacy of the state/nation at the heart of their arguments and objections. However, the disagreement is in essence, it is between those who advocate the necessity of democratizing the system of international relations, reforming the United Nations, that is, the international community, and expanding it beyond the scope of the P5 (the permanent members of security council), as to what is the legal and procedural framework that allowed this new type of crime called the crime against humanity, on the one hand, and among those who deal with humanity as a supreme entity superior to states and Super powers, or prior to them, on the other hand.
A court under siege
Only during the final days of the Rome Diplomatic Conference in 1998, the drafters conceded that the UN Security Council would be permitted to positively and negatively intervene in the exercise of the Court’s jurisdiction. Essentially, the Security Council was given the discretionary authority:
(1) To refer situations to the ICC’s Prosecutor for investigation as well; and
(2) To request the Court not to commence or proceed with an investigation or prosecution for a renewable period of twelve months. The manner in which this designed relationship between the UN Security Council and the ICC has played out in practice has raised strong concerns among many of the ICC’s States Parties and has recently instigated proposals for institutional reform.
Despite the refusal of three member states of the Security Council to join the International Criminal Court, the Council played a major role in the court’s policies through its “right” to open major lawsuits and to stop others. More than that, after the open confrontation between former US President Trump and the ICC, in June 2020, Donald Trump issued an executive order that allowed the United States to block the assets of what he called the ‘Kangaroo court’ ICC employees, preventing them and their immediate families from entering the United States. In September 2020, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said; Fatou Bensouda and another senior ICC official, Phakisa Mochochoko, will be sanctioned under the order, and those who “financially support these individuals also risk being sanctioned.”
Message received, the new General Persecutor of the ICC knows very well the red lines of his job.
This rapid review is very necessary to understand the necessity of an independent, impartial and sovereign tribunal for the Palestinian question which is not only a popular and civilian in itself, but also a real Tribunal Watch for the ICC, the ICJ, but also the oligarchy and global power in the UN Security Council.
From Bertrand Russell Tribunal to a Global Tribunal on Palestine
In 1966, a great philosopher of the last century lunched an appeal for an international tribunal against war criminals in Vietnam. Many philosophers, jurists and public personalities joined this appeal justified by Russell in few words: “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”. Russell, Sartre, Lelio Basso, Deutscher Dedijer, Günther Anders and others, wanted to bring about the “resuscitation of the jus contra bellum which was still-born at Nuremberg – the substitution of ethical and juridical rules for the law of the jungle”.
Symbolic tribunals have been thriving in this century, and with good reason: intolerable events are unfolding around the world and the institutions responsible for taking action – Courts, States, the UN – are failing to react. And so, it falls to philosophers, civil society actors, independents jurists and political activists, seeking to overcome their powerlessness in the face of this situation, to stage their own interventions in the form of popular tribunals.
International Tribunal on Palestine
The International Tribunal on Palestine is an international citizen-based Tribunal of conscience must be created in response to the demands of the global civil society (NGOs, charities, Trade-unions, faith-based organizations, philosophers, Lawyers and HR defenders) to investigate, inform and mobilize public opinion and relevant institutions and decision-makers in light of continuing failures to uphold international law in the context of Palestinians Rights.
This Tribunal will examine all the evidence that may be placed before it by any source or party. The evidence may be oral, or in the form of hard or audiovisual documents. No evidence relevant to our purposes will be refused attention. Our purpose is to establish, without fear or favor, the full truth about all human rights violations and massive crimes committed in Palestine since 1948, the violation of all UN resolutions concerning the Palestinian people. We sincerely hope that our efforts will help to open eyes to the establishment, over the last decades, of an apartheid system supported and covered by the declining dominant world system.
Today, we are in dire need of building dynamic action strategies capable of confronting the whales of the world’s political and economic powers entrenched on the front of the Israeli aggressor. It has become more and more clear that it is necessary to search for a gathering point for truly thinking heads and truly free minds, with lively HR defenders and legal energies, in order to place Palestine at the heart of the challenges we are experiencing today, whether we are historians or philosophers, whether we are judges or lawyers, whether we are jurists or not. Citizens of this world…
It is the moment of choosing between the value of justice and the vices of brutality. No matter how harsh the balance of power is, it is necessary to remember at every moment that we are at the end of an era, and that building the future begins today.
It is possible to build another world, a world of justice, peace and liberation of oppressed peoples.
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- Practical:
- The opening session of the Tribunal can realized in 6-7-8 June 2024
- The opening session will take 3 days – in Geneva
- A symbolic address reference and website tribunalswatch.com will be ready 2 months before.
- A preparatory Staff is already in action.
- The Tribunal consisted of a combination of judges, lawyers, HR defenders, philosophers and respected public international figures.
[1] International Court of Justice, Case concerning the military and paramilitary activities in and against Nicaragua (Nicaragua vs. United States of America). Judgment of 27 June 1986.
[2] For the second veto, see S/PV.2718.
[3] James A. Paul, Of Foxes and Chickens, Oligarchy and Global Power in the UN Security Council. SIHR/FHM 2023.
