Revitalizing Juridical Reasoning over Punishment: 

The Prefigurative Politics of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal

by Madlyn Sauer

In the institutional centers of legal order, legal reasoning appears primarily as a technical mechanism of sanction. To understand how juridical reasoning can instead emerge as an emancipatory, collective practice — to understand how it shapes resistance, reconstructs the past, and organizes possible futures — we must look elsewhere. We need to turn to the peripheries of institutionalized law: to turn to places where people seek and practice justice themselves, outside and beyond state courts, because legal institutions fail, retreat, or are absent. We need to turn to places where the radical imagination is not yet fully captured by legalism. 

One of the most significant of these alternative legal forums is the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal.

The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT), founded in 1979 as successor to the Russell Tribunals, operates as a civil society tribunal — without official mandate, without punitive power, without executive force. Many people who consider the law to be the exclusive domain of state authority often view the PPT as possessing merely a symbolic or moral appeal, or as political theater.

But what appears to them as a deficit is, in fact, its genuine strength: independence enables creativity and thus, transformation. The PPT’s strength lies precisely in its self-organization, which reveals how authority, legitimacy, categories, and procedural forms emerge — processes that remain concealed within official state courts.

The tribunal only responds to requests from “the peoples” such as social movement coalitions. It functions as a permanent tool that can quickly get to work, working and organizing together with the requesting alliances, rather than acting on their behalf (Tognoni, 2018, p. 47). The tribunal understand the real ability of a formalized public hearing to make stories of communities visible, audible, central, and worthy of reference for whom official history provides neither time, space, nor adequate categories (Fraudatario & Tognoni, 2012, pp. 9–13). The statement that “the peoples are the protagonists of the demand for justice,” becomes meaningful through the PPT’s capacity to reclaim and activate the emancipatory potential of recognition politics –– a process that could be described with Glen Coulthard’s concept of “self-recognition” (Coulthard, 2007, p. 456).

The PPT’s purpose is not punishment, nor even condemnation of the perpetrators. The tribunal aims at the exposure of accountability, and the defense of fundamental collective rights—rights articulated in the 1976 Algiers Universal Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples, on which the tribunal is grounded. In holding tribunals, the PPT explores international law as a path towards people’s self-determination, liberation, and political participation.

To show how a PPT session produces collective reasoning to reconstruct the past and actively shape possible futures, I turn to the concrete example of the 48th Session in Colombia in 2021, which investigated “continuous genocide, impunity, and crimes against peace” admist the country’s official transitional justice process (TPP, 2021; Sauer, 2025).

The tribunal was formed by over 200 Colombian organizations and 180 individuals. It was initiated by Colombia’s grassroots parliament, the Congreso de los Pueblos and coordinated by the Comité impulso, which was comprised of twenty major national organizations including Black, Afro-Colombian, and Indigenous organizations, peasant associations, human rights organizations, opposition political parties and movements, labor unions, LGBTQI+ collectives, and student movements. What unified these diverse actors was a shared commitment to peace, pluralistic democracy, social justice, and socio-ecological coexistence with nature––positions that placed them in direct conflict with the colonial, extractivist, and oligarchic order in Colombia. 

It was precisely because of their commitment to emancipatory politics that these organizations, as well as many many more, had long been targeted under the state’s counterinsurgency doctrine of the “internal enemy,” subjected to the same “technologies of power”: from assassinations and torture to forced disappearances, displacement, malnutrition, and other technologies of social destruction.

The PPT positioned itself as a critical intervention within Colombia’s transitional justice process after the 2016 Peace Agreement between the FARC-EP guerrilla and the government of Juan Manuel Santos. It operated in parallel with the Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence, and Non-Repetition, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), and the Missing Persons Search Unit (UPBD).

Contrary to what one might assume, the PPT did not position itself in close relation to the JEP, but directly to the Truth Commission –– because truth played an exceptional role in both instances.

Unlike the official Truth Commission, which produced an institutionalized, and socially reconciled narrative of the armed conflict, the PPT offered an independent and radical account.

Both the Truth Commission and the PPT agreed on one central fact (which was already know before): more than 80% of the war’s victims were unarmed civilians — 80% of 700,000 (political) assassinations, 10,000 extrajudicial killings, 120,000 forced disappearances, and about 200,000 forced exiles (just to give you some numbers about the dimension of destruction).

The PPT’s judgment, however, pushed the analysis further. It concluded that the harm inflicted on civilians was not collateral damage, but the objective of a state-led extermination strategy against the “internal enemy”, which ultimately unfolded as a ”continuous genocide”, marked by recurrent “rising tides and tsunamis of violence” from 1946 to 2021, and to this day.

While the Truth Commission traced the armed conflict’s origins to the rise of communist and liberal guerrillas in the 1960s, the PPT located them earlier: For example, in the 1928 Banana Massacre of striking United Fruit Company workers in Ciénaga, in the Magdalena departement.

An extraordinary example was the annihilation of the popular mass movement around the political leader Jorge E. Gaitán in the 1940s. His assassination in 1948 inaugurated the first decade of civil war, known as La Violencia. Consequently, these very violent conditions, concentrated in rural areas, mostly against peasant communities, gave rise to the first liberal and communist guerrilla movements in 1961.

Importantly, the 2021 tribunal was not merely retrospective. It also investigated the renewed wave of extreme violence after the 2016 peace agreement, a wave that not only persists but has continued to grow.

This escalation was what prompted the coalition to request the PPT in April 2020. By this time, nearly 1,000 social leaders and 250 signatories of the Peace Accord — former combatants who had laid down their arms to continue their struggle within a civilian political framework — had been assassinated.

The tribunal served simultaneously as diagnosis, self–defense, and urgent international outcry, even as the far-right government of Ivan Duque systematically destroyed the Peace Accord under the guise of implementing it.

The tribunal extended a longer cycle of collective reasoning involving the PPT and Colombian social movements, following earlier sessions in 1991 and 2006–2008 — each aimed at understanding and preventing the ongoing destruction of emancipatory, leftist and communal social movements and communities.

But how was the tribunal organized? And what does it mean to speak of reasoning as a collective, emancipatory practice?

Here, juridical reasoning emerges through the co-production of three actor groups: First, the “prosecution”, the Comité Impulso, the Colombian coordinating committee, developed the indictment and provided the evidence. The committee defined categories such as continuous genocide, designed the tribunal’s conceptual framework, conducted research, recorded witnesses' testimonies, commissioned expert reports, mapped territories, smuggled recordings in and out of prisons, and drafted the tribunal’s program. They presented 77 reports and testimonies during the public hearings. Against this backdrop, the core work and decision-making remained with those who requested the PPT. (Ivan Velazquez Gómez and Ángela María Buitrago acted as tribunal “prosecutors”, both had minister positions in the Gustavo Petro Government.)

Second, the PPT Secretariat, drawing on decades of experience. It brings procedural knowledge and acts on a strong political approach to support the petitioning coalition to shape their own tribunal process. The Secretariat supports the conception and structuring of the process, it ensures coherence with the PPT Statute, informs the accused parties, selects the panel of judges, publishes its findings, and sends the judgment to international institutions such as the ICC.

Third, the international panel of judges, composed of 12 eminent lawyers, academics, activists, and intellectuals — six were permanent PPT members, and the other six were external experts — listened to the testimonies and experts, analyzed and deliberated the full body of evidence, and issued the sentence. Most come from social movements; all worked pro bono.

Together, these three actor groups transformed collective reasoning into an epistemic and political bridge –– connecting local and international knowledge, peasant and academic archives, institutional and grassroots practices, vertical justice and horizontal solidarity.

The three–day public hearings in Bucaramanga, Medellín and Bogotá were spaces where this reasoning process was performed. One of the most powerful features of the PPT is presence itself — the shared vulnerability of sitting together, breathing together, listening to a testimony just meters away.

Here, reasoning is not abstract: it is lived social capacity to perceive, feel, think, reason, collaborate, and act together. Empathy provides ignition for political agency. Testimony is woven not only through legal and political arguments, but also through singing, painting, collective ritual, and poetic narration rooted in the diverse cultural practices of the communities. In this way, the PPT becomes both a magnifying microscope and megaphone –– amplifying resistance and political organizing.

From here, three dimensions of revitalizing juridical reasoning become visible:

The PPT’s purpose is neither punishment nor condemnation, but rather the exposure of accountability and the collective affirmation of people’s fundamental rights as articulated in the 1976 Algiers Declaration, such as the right to existence, the right of internal and external self-determination, economic rights, or minority rights.

The tribunal functions as the people’s own permanent juridical instrument for activating the Declaration’s articles through sessions exploring the concrete violations experienced by oppressed and victimized communities and groups:

Here we can describe, “giving justice back to the people” through Glen Coulthards understanding of “self-determination from below” as a self-constituting power. Through its collaborative practice, the PPT facilitates “self–recognition” among oppressed and marginalized communities, fostering a new awareness of themselves as political agents (Coulthard, 2007; 2014). By examining concrete violations and oppression in light of the collective rights they hold, communities assert their own authority to define the harms they have endured and to shape the narrative of their own history, thereby reclaiming the emancipatory potential of recognition politics. In doing so, they reaffirm the legitimacy of anti-colonial and post-colonial struggles — including, in some contexts, armed struggles.

In the public hearing, portraits of the murdered, forced disappeared, and imprisoned filled the auditorium. The tribunal’s claim ¡Que pare el genocidio! – Stop the genocide – was magnified by their symbolic presence.

Here, a second meaning of juridical reasoning as resistance to memoricide and epistemicide appears. The “continuous genocide” identified by the tribunal’s participants is carried out not only through physical destruction, but through the erasure of collective memory, replacing history with euphemisms like La Violencia or el conflicto armado. Genocide becomes effective when a people can no longer share its own history and thus its continuity; imposed oblivion is one of the genocide’s core mechanisms.

In Colombia, where truth-telling can be lethal, both forgetting and remembering are forms of collective trauma. The tribunal’s categories — continuous genocide, impunity, crimes against peace — served not only analytical purposes. They helped rebuilding the fractures social fabric and consciousness, connecting experiences across generations and communities, and inspiring futures rooted in the  unfinished struggles of those who came before.

The tribunal called upon Colombian society to recognize that the genocidal destruction of these social groups is the destruction of part of the national group itself. As the organizer Gloria Silva said: We have all been transformed by a genocidal process — even those who never counted themselves victims.

Finally, the PPT's emancipatory reasoning process is prefigurative. Its peoples’ jurisdiction anticipates the future of a more just legal order by enacting it in the present moment: a structure that is accessible, creative, victim-centered, and solidarity–based. Each tribunal is unique, rooted in local struggles and shaped by its organizers. As co-organizer Catalina Osorio expressed, “A tribunal as we are, and as we live. Not so international and legalistic, with a panel of international experts reading out a bunch of papers, but a hearing that matters to the people, that embodies what feels just to them — filled with memory, culture, joy, and resistance.” (Sauer, 2025, p. 138).

In my view, the essence of the PPT is best captured by Argentine–French author Julio Cortázar, a long-term member of the PPT himself, with whose words I would like to conclude my talk. At the PPT's inauguration in 1979, he urged his comrades to “use the most varied and even most unpredictable means to turn every legal text into a piece of irrepressible life.” To “push imagination to its extreme limits in all fields, to “invent bridges and paths toward those who from far away will hear our voice and turn it one day into that great clamor that will collapse the barriers that today separate them from justice, sovereignty, and dignity.” (Cortázar, 1979 (2020), p. 48).

In this spirit, Free Palestine!

Bibliography:

Cortázar, J. (1979). Ponti e cammini. In Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (ed.) (2020). Diritti dei popoli e disuguaglianze globali: I 40 anni del Tribunale Permanente dei Popoli. (44-49). Altreconomia.

Coulthard, Glen S. (2007). Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Canada, Contemporary Political Theory, 6/4, 11/ 2007, https://doig.org/10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300307.

Coulthard, Glen S. (2014). Place against Empire  The Dene Nation, Land Claims, and the  Politics of Recognition in the North (pp. 147–173). In: Eisenberg, A., Webber, J., Coulthard, G., and Boisselle, A.: Recognition versus Self-Determination. Dilemmas of Emancipatory Politics. UBC Press.

Feierstein, D. (2019). Nuevos desafíos del Tribunal Permanente de los Pueblos en el siglo XXI: las luchas por la hegemonía en la creación del derecho penal internacional, Revista nuestrAmérica, 7 (14), 27–37. https://nuestramerica.cl/ojs/index.php/nuestramerica/article/view/e6873706. 

Fraudatario, S., and Tognoni, G. (2018). The Participation of Peoples and the Development of International Law: The Laboratory of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal. In A. Byrnes, and G. Simm (ed.), Peoples’ Tribunals and International Law (pp. 133–154). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108368360.007. 

Sauer, Madlyn (2025): Que pare el genocidio. El Tribunal Permanente de los Pueblos en Colombia 2021. Documentos occasionales. Centro de Investigacion y Educacion Popular Programa Por la Paz Bogotá (CINEP/PPP). https://cinep.org.co/publicaciones/producto/que-pare-el-genocido_do90/. 

Tognoni, G. (2018). The History of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal. In A. Byrnes, and G. Simm (eds.), Peoples’ Tribunals and International Law (pp. 42–58). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108368360.003

Tribunal Permanente de los Pueblos. (1976). Declaración de Argel. https://permanentpeoplestribunal.org/declaracion-de-argel/?lang=es. 

Tribunal Permanente de los Pueblos. (2021). Sentencia. 48a sésion sobre Genocidio político, impunidad y los crimenes contra la paz en Colombia. https://permanentpeoplestribunal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/TPP-SENTENCIA-COLOMBIA-2021-DEFINITIVA-CON-ANEXOS.pdf.

Interviews:

Feierstein, Daniel, Buenos Aires/Berlín (entrevista por Zoom), 24 de abril de 2023.

Fraudatario, Simona, Rome, 26 de septiembre de 2023

Giraldo Moreno, Javier, personal interview, Bogotá, 17 de marzo de 2023.

Osorio, Catalina, Bucaramanga/Bogotá (entrevista por Zoom), 27 de febrero de 2023.

Texier, Philippe, Paris/Berlín (entrevista por Zoom), 25 de mayo de 2023.

Tognoni, Gianni, Milán/Viena (entrevista por Zoom), 14 de noviembre de 2023.