Edmond Jouve
in Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos n. 4 (May 1984)
However, initiatives were taken to fill this gap. In 1945-1946, the victors of the Second World War entrusted two ad hoc tribunals – the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals – with the task of trying the major German and Japanese war criminals. A “cycle of the future” was opened. Jean Paul Sartre will remind us of this when the time comes for tribunals of opinion.
The Vietnam War would be the birthplace of the greatest of them all. One man would throw his weight behind the battle: the British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell. Together with others, he will create an International Tribunal against war crimes committed in Vietnam. His work will reach the universal conscience.
The success of the venture led one of its most ardent supporters, Italian Senator Lelio Basso, to convene a Russell II Tribunal from 1973 to 1975.
It will have to deal with the violations of rights practised by the dictatorships of Latin America. In order to judge the most blatant violations of the rights of peoples throughout the world, other means had to be invented.
The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, created in Bologna in 1979, responds to this concern. It has already held ten sessions and issued two advisory opinions and eight sentences. Chaired by Professor François Rigaux, it has five Nobel Prize winners among its fifty-seven members. The Tribunal rules in law.
It bases its decisions on the legal instruments of the United Nations and other international organisations, but also on a specific text: the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples adopted on 4 July 1976 in Algiers by the international conference convened by the Lelio Basso Foundation.
This manifesto proclaims, among other things, that “all the peoples of the world have an equal right to freedom, the right to be free from foreign interference and to choose the government of their own choice, the right, if enslaved, to struggle for their liberation, and the right to benefit, in their struggle, from the assistance of other peoples. The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal was given the task of verifying whether the rights thus recognised to the peoples are consistent with the exercise of those rights.
The Tribunal hears from the people themselves through their representatives. Thus, it can be seized not only by the traditional governmental and international bodies, but also by a non-governmental organisation, a national liberation movement, a political group, a trade union or a group of individuals.
In the Western Sahara case (Brussels, 11 November 1979), the request for an opinion came from the Polisario Front. In the Eritrea case (Milan, 26 May 1980), it came from the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPFL). In the case of El Salvador (Mexico City, 11 February 1981), the complaint was filed by the President of the Human Rights Commission of that country, Marianella Garcia Villas, who was recently assassinated. The application concerning Afghanistan (Stockholm, 3 May 1981) was lodged by international personalities.
The creative work
In the four years of its existence, the Tribunal has continued to be legally creative. For example, it applied the right of free determination, but did not want to limit it to the law of decolonisation. In the case of Argentina (Geneva, 4 May 1980) it declared itself in favour of affirming “the right to political self-determination even against oppressive state structures”.
In the most classic way, it found the Maubere people to be victims of the crime of genocide (East Timor, Lisbon, 21 June 1980), but in the El Salvador case it departed from the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide by condemning the military junta government for attempting to “destroy a group of people because of their actual or potential political opinions or opposition”.
By departing from Article 2 § 4 of the UN Charter, but in line with some of its resolutions, the Tribunal has legitimised the use of force. As was the case with El Salvador (“the people of El Salvador legitimately exercise their right to insurrection”), the recent award on Guatemala (Madrid, 31 January 1983) states that the people of that country “have the right to exercise all forms of resistance, including armed struggle, through their representative organisations”.
The Tribunal does not limit itself to condemning violations committed by states. In the case of the Philippines and the Bangsa Moro People (Antwerp, 3 November 1980), it blamed “a group of American, Japanese and European multinational corporations” for their role in the violation of the sovereign rights of the Filipino and Bangsa Moro peoples. He also denied any legitimacy to the Marcos government. In the Zaire case (Rotterdam, 2 September 1982), he did not shy away from condemning President Mobutu.
A right of peoples is thus being born. The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal is helping to bring it about. But this new law suffers from the rivalries that oppose it to the State, in particular to the “new” State. The latter – too often the product of a people gone wrong – does not make its task any easier.
The State and its high priests are seeking to dispute the Courts of opinion and the rights of the people that they secrete. They contest their legitimacy in the name of the sacrosanct principle reminded to Sartre by General de Gaulle in 1967: “All justice belongs only to the State. The objectivity of the courts of opinion is also questioned because of the difficulty of implementing the rights of the defence.
Yet, with difficulty, but surely, the right of peoples is gaining ground. The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal has emerged, in the beautiful words of Antonio Cassese, as a “catalyst of opinion”, has offered a platform to the peoples. It has begun to speak to the universal human conscience and the latter has begun to hear it.
Out of hiding
This “emergence of a new consciousness of the people” can also have an impact on the states themselves. The African states provided the best example of this by adopting the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights in Nairobi on June 1981. The Organisation of African Unity and the UN Sub-Commission on Human Rights in Geneva also made use of the work of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal.
In its footsteps, or those of the Russell Tribunal, other jurisdictions have flourished. Last March, in Tokyo, an International People’s Tribunal focused its investigations on Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. The idea launched by Bertrand Russell in 1966 has thus proved fruitful. Whatever their clumsiness or ambiguities, these attempts are helping to bring the concept of people out of the clandestinity in which, all too often, we wish to confine it.
What better tribute can there be than that legal doctrine is beginning to take an interest in it and to recognise it? One of its most eminent members – René-Jean Dupuy, Professor at the Collège de France – observed in his 1981 General Course on International Law at The Hague that the people are “in the process of becoming – if not already become a “subject” of international law (a classic expression that does not fit well with a phenomenon of liberation), let us say rather an agent of the law of nations”. The people are no longer completely unloved. They can grow up.
in: Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos n. 4 (May 1984)