This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these messages)
|
The Permanent Peoples' Tribunal (PPT) is an international human rights organization founded in Bologna, Italy, on June 24, 1979, at the initiative of Senator Lelio Basso. [1] It was established during the final session of the Russell Tribunal with the aim of condemning Latin American dictatorships. The court is composed of a president, four vice-presidents, a secretary-general and 66 international members. Since its establishment, the Tribunal conducted held 46 sessions.
The Permanent Peoples' Tribunal [2] began in Bologna in 1979 as a direct continuation of the experience of the Russell Tribunal II with Latin American dictatorships (1974–1976). It was promoted by Lelio Basso to denounce the crimes committed by the military regimes in the region. [3] The PPT is a means to push judicial courts based on intergovernmental treaties, such as the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. [4]
The work of the PPT is based on the principles expressed in the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples [5] [6] proclaimed in Algiers in 1976 and the main international instruments protecting human rights. The historical and geographical context of the Declaration, known as the Charter of Algiers, links the general principles of the Declaration for the liberation struggles—which Resolution 1514 (XV) of the United Nations [7] of 14 December 1960 had already put under the protection of international law—with the understanding that the right to self-determination could not be proclaimed as fulfilled and that it did not involve decolonization.
The court is composed of a president (currently Philippe Texier of France), four vice-presidents, a secretary general (currently Gianni Tognoni of Italy), a coordination officer (currently Simona Fraudatario of Italy) , and 58 members from 26 countries, [8] from different disciplines such as law, economy, sociology, arts, and literature.[ citation needed ]
Number of members | Countries |
---|---|
1 | Australia, Belgium, Cambodia, Chile, Haiti, Ireland, Mexico, Nicaragua, Norway, Palestine, Peru, Portugal, Senegal, Thailand, United Kingdom |
2 | Ecuador, Germany, The Netherlands, Tunisia |
3 | Colombia, India |
4 | Spain |
5 | France |
6 | Argentina, United States |
8 | Italy |
As of 2016, the Tribunal has held 46 sessions [10] on numerous cases of human rights violations. The judgments of the TPP rely on sources of existing international law. [11]
Human rights are moral principles or norms that establish standards of human behaviour and are regularly protected as substantive rights in municipal and international law. They are commonly understood as inalienable, fundamental rights "to which a person is inherently entitled simply because he or she is a human being" and which are "inherent in all human beings", regardless of age, ethnic origin, location, language, religion, ethnicity, or any other status. They are applicable everywhere and at all times in the sense of being universal, and they are egalitarian in the sense of being the same for everyone. They are regarded as requiring empathy and the rule of law, and imposing an obligation on individuals to respect the human rights of others; it is generally considered that they should not be taken away except as a result of due process based on specific circumstances.
A war crime is a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for actions by combatants in action, such as intentionally killing civilians or intentionally killing prisoners of war, torture, taking hostages, unnecessarily destroying civilian property, deception by perfidy, wartime sexual violence, pillaging, and for any individual that is part of the command structure who orders any attempt to committing mass killings including genocide or ethnic cleansing, the granting of no quarter despite surrender, the conscription of children in the military and flouting the legal distinctions of proportionality and military necessity.
Universal jurisdiction is a legal principle that allows states or international organizations to claim criminal jurisdiction over an accused person, regardless of where the alleged crime was committed and irrespective of the accused's nationality, country of residence, or any other connection to the prosecuting entity. Crimes prosecuted under universal jurisdiction are considered crimes against all, too serious to tolerate jurisdictional arbitrage. The concept of universal jurisdiction is therefore closely linked to the idea that some international norms are erga omnes, or owed to the entire world community, as well as to the concept of jus cogens—that certain international law obligations are binding on all states.
Crimes against humanity are certain serious crimes committed as part of a large-scale attack against civilians. Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity can be committed during both peace and war and against a state's own nationals as well as foreign nationals. Together with war crimes, genocide, and the crime of aggression, crimes against humanity are one of the core crimes of international criminal law and, like other crimes against international law, have no temporal or jurisdictional limitations on prosecution.
The law of war is a component of international law that regulates the conditions for initiating war and the conduct of hostilities. Laws of war define sovereignty and nationhood, states and territories, occupation, and other critical terms of law.
International human rights law (IHRL) is the body of international law designed to promote human rights on social, regional, and domestic levels. As a form of international law, international human rights law is primarily made up of treaties, agreements between sovereign states intended to have binding legal effect between the parties that have agreed to them; and customary international law. Other international human rights instruments, while not legally binding, contribute to the implementation, understanding and development of international human rights law and have been recognized as a source of political obligation.
The Russell Tribunal, also known as the International War Crimes Tribunal, Russell–Sartre Tribunal, or Stockholm Tribunal, was a private People's Tribunal organised in 1966 by Bertrand Russell, British philosopher and Nobel Prize winner, and hosted by French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre, along with Lelio Basso, Simone de Beauvoir, Vladimir Dedijer, Ralph Schoenman, Isaac Deutscher, Günther Anders and several others. The tribunal investigated and evaluated American foreign policy and military intervention in Vietnam.
The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is a United Nations body whose mission is to promote and protect human rights around the world. The Council has 47 members elected for staggered three-year terms on a regional group basis. The headquarters of the Council are at the United Nations Office at Geneva in Switzerland.
Francis Anthony Boyle is an American human rights lawyer and professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law. He has served as counsel for Bosnia and Herzegovina and has supported the rights of Palestinians and indigenous peoples. Boyle was one of the architects behind the formulation of the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam and author of The Tamil Genocide by Sri Lanka. He is a long time conspiracy theorist about bioengineered viruses and in Jan 2020 declared COVID was "a genetically engineered bioweapon."
International criminal law (ICL) is a body of public international law designed to prohibit certain categories of conduct commonly viewed as serious atrocities and to make perpetrators of such conduct criminally accountable for their perpetration. The core crimes under international law are genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression.
Shadi Sadr is an Iranian lawyer, human rights advocate, essayist and journalist. She co-founded Justice for Iran (JFI) in 2010 and is the Executive Director of the NGO. She has published and lectured worldwide.
Impunity is the ability to act with exemption from punishments, losses, or other negative consequences. In the international law of human rights, impunity is failure to bring perpetrators of human rights violations to justice and, as such, itself constitutes a denial of the victims' right to justice and redress. Impunity is especially common in countries which lack the tradition of rule of law, or suffer from pervasive corruption, or contain entrenched systems of patronage, or where the judiciary is weak or members of the security forces are protected by special jurisdictions or immunities. Impunity is sometimes considered a form of denialism of historical crimes.
Between 1941 and 1945, the government of Nazi Germany perpetrated the Holocaust: a large-scale industrialised genocide in which approximately six million Jews were systematically murdered throughout German-occupied Europe. Since World War II, several countries have criminalised Holocaust denial—the assertion by antisemites that the genocide was fabricated or has been exaggerated. Currently, 17 European countries, along with Israel and Canada, have laws in place that cover Holocaust denial as a punishable offence. Many countries also have broader laws that criminalise genocide denial as a whole, including that of the Holocaust. Among the countries that have banned Holocaust denial, Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Poland, Romania, Russia and Ukraine have also banned Nazi symbols. Additionally, any expression of genocide justification is also a criminal offence in several countries, as is any attempt to portray Nazism in a positive light.
War crimes during the final stages of the Sri Lankan Civil War are war crimes and crimes against humanity which the Sri Lanka Armed Forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have been accused of committing during the final months of the Sri Lankan Civil War in 2009. The war crimes include attacks on civilians and civilian buildings by both sides; executions of combatants and prisoners by both sides; enforced disappearances by the Sri Lankan military and paramilitary groups backed by them; sexual violence by the Sri Lankan military; the systematic denial of food, medicine, and clean water by the government to civilians trapped in the war zone; child recruitment, hostage taking, use of military equipment in the proximity of civilians and use of forced labor by the Tamil Tigers.
The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights(ECCHR) is an independent, nonprofit non-governmental organization with the aim of enforcing human rights through legal means. Using litigation, it tries to hold state and non-state actors responsible human rights violations. It was founded in 2007 by the German civil rights attorney Wolfgang Kaleck together with a group of human rights lawyers, in order to help protect the rights guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as other declarations of human rights and national constitutions, by juridical means. ECCHR engages in litigation, using European, international, and national law to help protect human rights.
The International Crimes Tribunal (Bangladesh) (ICT of Bangladesh) is a domestic war crimes tribunal in Bangladesh set up in 2009 to investigate and prosecute suspects for the genocide committed in 1971 by the Pakistan Army and their local collaborators Razakars, Al-Badr and Al-Shams during the Bangladesh Liberation War. During the 2008 general election, the Awami League (AL) pledged to try war criminals. The government set up the tribunal after the Awami League won the general election in December 2008 with a more than two-thirds majority in parliament.
Hosbet Suresh was a judge of the Bombay High Court who led a number of commissions that investigated violations of human rights.
International People's Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir (IPTK) is a People's Tribunal formed by Indian human rights activists for the purpose of probing human right violations in the Indian-administered territory of Jammu and Kashmir, and bridging the gap between people living in Kashmir and rest of India. It was first convened in 2008 by Parvez Imroz, Angana P. Chatterji, Gautam Navlakha and Zaheer-Ud-Din. Chatterji served as convener until December 2012.
The 1973 United Nations International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid was the first binding international treaty which declared the crime of apartheid and racial segregation under international law. It was adopted by the General Assembly on 30 November 1973 and came into force on 18 July 1976. It passed by 91 votes in favor, four against and 26 abstentions. 110 countries are currently parties to the convention, with 26 signatories.
On 12 December 2006, the Federal Supreme Court found guilty 77 top Derg officials accused by the government of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) over the Red Terror (1976–1978). The head of the Derg, Mengistu Haile Mariam, who fled to Zimbabwe, and other 22 Derg members were sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment on 11 January 2007.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)