They are now common initiatives deployed across the world by people, organizations and communities in order to seek justice of a kind that they cannot achieve, are prevented from achieving, by their governments (and government controlled institutions such as Universities) and corporations. Their decisions are not binding in law, but they highlight the wrongdoing of perpetrators of moral wrongs and illegalities. Thus they contribute to the piercing of the hegemonic veil of innocence and the development of resistance.
Richard Falk tells us that the Russell Tribunal and others following it “emerged to fill the normative vacuum created by the stark hypocrisies of international justice.”[4]
Today these people’s initiatives are springing up because of the stark hypocrisies not only because of the failure of justice at the international level but also failure at the national and sub-national level, including the impunity allowed human and environmental rights violators in local and regional jurisdictions.
These tribunals and inquiries all have common features[5]:
- They are organized by people’s organizations of civil society;
- They are organized to establish the facts of and report on significant human, and more recently environmental, rights violations;
- They are organized to establish the facts of and report on significant human, and more recently environmental, rights violations.
Because governments, corporations-and Universities- have failed in their duties to protect and do justice for the people under international and domestic law; and because people and their organizations feel a moral responsibility to “do something” about those violations.
Recommendations are normally made, for example, in order to end impunity, protect people from being victims, enable remediation.
Such People’s initiatives are intended to aid in the formation of a “new consciousness” about the damage done by the perpetrators, the injury to the victims, and the possible continuation of harm, thus demonstrating the need for organisation of the people and developing resistance.
Some other benefits are: the development of research and our knowledge of the particular problem and various solutions. Establishing of organisations for follow-up; wider and deeper, more focused networking between e.g. community, academics and activists.
They are also a way of challenging state, or hegemonic, history, revising it into a people’s history.[6]
Importantly, they also demonstrate the capacity of ordinary people to deal with serious problems that arise in everyday life, while providing the experience we will need when the time comes when people rise up and change the exploitative system in which we live now.
Seeking justice, not found in the State legal system
Today the Peoples’ Tribunal/Inquiry movement is part of the larger movement for building new and fair societies, creating new relations between people, and institutions alternative to those of the traditional modern state. When doing research on alternative law systems in eastern Turkey’s main city Diyarbakir cultural capital of the Kurdish region-I was told by my Kurdish interviewee “We are not building a legal system such as that of the state. We are building a justice system.” See my article https://www.transcend.org/tms/2025/01/kurds-building-an-alternative-justice-system-in-eastern-turkey/
Kurdish refugee children from Kobani swing from an electricity power column outside a refugee camp at the Turkish town of Suruc, near the Syrian border.
Photo: Giannis Papanikos, Shutterstock
Examples
Australia
- Two People’s Tribunals-Sydney and Brussels (1976 ) Homosexuality and law, discussed here: https://doi.org/10.1080/13200968.2023.2184449
- The People’s Inquiry into Detention in Australia, see Briskman l, Latham S, and Goddard C (eds) Human Rights Overboard: Seeking Asylum in Australia (2008). doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fep040
- The People’s Tribunal: An Inquiry into the “Business Improvement Program” at the University of Melbourne (2014) https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/7334347
- International Peoples’ Tribunal on the Nuclear Powers and the Destruction of Human Civilisation, Sydney (2016)
- Rights of Nature Tribunal Australia: Four Ecological Cases-Forests, Rivers, the Great Artesian Basin, the Atmospheric Commons and the Great Barrier Reef (2016)
- Australian People’s Tribunal for Community and Nature’s Rights: Inquiry into the Health of the Barka/Darling River and Menindee Lakes (2019)
- The People’s Inquiry into Nuclear Weapons in Australia, (2022) Independent and Peaceful Australian Network
- Future Sooner: “Untold Stories” Citizen’s Inquiry into the health Impacts of coal-fired power stations (2025)
Other examples
- The Russell Tribunal On Palestine (2010)[7]
- The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) on Living Wage as a Fundamental Right and the Role of International Institutions (2015- Final Report after 5 sessions) [on the conditions of garment workers in S E Asia]
- Russell Tribunal on Palestine (2015)
- International Tribunal of Conscience of Peoples in Movement (2015) [the Crisis of Migration from Latin America]
- Four people’s tribunals (2 by the PPT; 2 International Peoples’ Tribunals (IPT)) documenting the continuing serious human rights violations in the Philippines
- The PPT into Myanmar State Crimes Against Rohingya and other Ethnic Minorities (2017) [the first institution to name the slaughter of Rohingya a Genocide]
- The PPT on the killing of Journalists: Mexico, Syria, Sri Lanka (2018)
- The PPT on Human Rights, Fracking and climate Change 2019 Final Report, an Advisory Opinion [recommending inter alia the banning of fracking as inherently harmful to humans, their communities and the environment]
- The Gaza Tribunal (2025) [on the Israeli war crimes/ Genocide in Gaza)
Some references
Andrew Byrnes and Gabrielle Simm (eds) Peoples’ Tribunals and International Law (2017)
Regina Paulose (ed) People’s Tribunals, Human Rights and the Law: Searching for Justice (2020)
Arthur J Klinghoffer and Julia A Klinghoffer, International citizens’ tribunals: mobilizing public opinion to advance human rights
There are a host of articles on Peoples Tribunals now. See e.g. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opensecurity/peoples-tribunals-and-roots-of-civil-society-justice/
https://springmag.ca/the-rise-of-peoples-tribunals-and-their-importance-for-national-liberation-movements
https://www.nlg.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Peoples-Tribunals.pdf
https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3875&context=articles
See on the Permanent Peoples Tribunal https://permanentpeoplestribunal.org/?lang=en
NOTES:
[1] This is a revised version of a paper submitted for the Public Hearings of the People’s Inquiry into restriction on free speech in pro-Palestine actions on Australian University campuses, July 2025
[2] Named after the organiser of the Tribunal that indicted the USA for war crimes in the USA. An important predecessor of the Russell Tribunal, The Dewey Commission, examined the allegations b y Stalin and the USSR state against Leon Trotsky. See https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1997/05/dewe-m19.html
[3] Most commentators do not recognize the Inquiries concerning the allegations made by Stalin and his colleagues, particularly in the purge trials in the 1930s, against Trotsky as having an ancestral role.
[4] In https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opensecurity/peoples-tribunals-and-roots-of-civil-society-justice/
[5] The Tribunals generally indict an alleged perpetrator(s) of some violations of human and/or environmental right(s). The prosecutor presents the case and the defendant is invited to provide their defence. The panel of judges make a Judgement (or an advisory Opinion) based on all the evidence.
[6] See Bunting, A and Ikhimiuokor, I K https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/creating-space-for-writing-alternative-histories-through-peoples-tribunals/
[7] This was an independent tribunal, not related to the original Russell tribunal.
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Gill H. Boehringer is former Dean, now Honorary Professor at Macquarie University Law School, Sydney, Australia. He received his BSocS, from the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University (1955); an LLB from Hastings College of Law, University of California (1962) and an LLM from the London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London(1967). For further information please contact me gill_boehringer@hotmail.com