The convening of civil society tribunals: Why the State does not own the Law

by Madlyn Sauer

I met the Colombian human rights lawyer Santiago Salinas Mirando at a street café in Bogotá. We spoke about the 48th Session of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal in Colombia, which he helped organize there in March 2021. According to him, the idea of a civil society tribunal may appear philosophical at first glance, but is in reality, it poses a concrete question: What is justice? For many survivors of human rights violations or systemic violence, this question becomes especially urgent when formal legal systems fail to provide clarification, recognition, or healing.

Peoples' tribunals, organized by civil society actors and social movements, arise from a deep and enduring need for public recognition and the pursuit of truth and justice. They emerge in contexts where state courts remain silent, laws are absent, or the political will to enforce existing legislation is lacking. In such situations, these tribunals create alternative, emancipatory spaces for listening, accountability, and collective responsibility; thereby appealing to the conscience of humanity.

The origins of this practice trace back to 1966 with the Russell Tribunal on Vietnam, the first of its kind.. Initiated by British peace activist Bertrand Russell, the tribunal brought together renowned lawyers, intellectuals, and activists, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Tariq Ali, and Melba Hernández, to condemn the United States for war crimes and acts of genocide during the Vietnam War. Since then, numerous tribunals have been convened worldwide– from The Hague to Bukavu, Yucatán to Tokyo and East Timor to London — including the International Iran Tribunal, the World Tribunal on Iraq and the Russell Tribunal on Palestine.

What unites all these tribunals is the shared conviction that silence is not neutral. The Russell Tribunal’s slogans – “to break the crimes of silence” and “to call things by their name” – capture the essence of this endeavor: silence protects the injustice that remains unnamed. As these tribunals demonstrate, listening and ignoring are not passive responses to violence but its very infrastructure.  They are the fertile ground on which impunity takes root, and violence perpetuates itself into the future.

Civil society tribunals examine specific instances of injustice through public hearings while investigating broader patterns of systematic abuse. The focus is on the victims: they testify as witnesses, recounting their experiences of violence in front of a jury composed of civil society representatives. These juries often include prominent lawyers, jurists, activists, academics, and cultural workers. Although modeled on the format of criminal court proceedings, their purpose is fundamentally different: rather than seeking punishment or retribution, these tribunals aim to restore dignity, foster collective memory, and return agency to those victimized and harmed. As political scientist Leah Bassel puts it, the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunals are “promises to listen”.

Unlike in state court trials, the prosecution explicitly aligns with the victims, acting as their legal voice and procedural advocate. The prosecution formulates a legally grounded accusation based on witness testimonies, expert reports, and submitted evidence. The accusation structures the proceedings and articulates the counter-hegemonic narrative that challenges dominant accounts of the injustice in question. While the jury's final verdict lacks formal legal authority, it carries significant political and symbolic weight: it identifies political and criminal accountability, raises public awareness, affirms dignity and reparation, and creates new emancipatory spaces for action. These judgments make an ethical claim – they seek to sensitize, inform, mobilize, and generate an international counterpublic where institutional silence has prevailed. Often, such a verdict is not the end of a process but a new beginning, fueling further inquiries in courts, political collective action, and the arts.

By adopting legal language while simultaneously subverting and reimagining it, civil society tribunals perform a critique of the law and experiment with alternative legal models and practices. They represent a search for justice that reflects communities’ lived experiences and values. These tribunals do not operate within a punitive tradition; instead, they offer visions of justice that are more democratic, inclusive, and attuned to social realities. They ask foundational questions: Who owns the law? Who has the authority to shape it? And what happens when official institutions abdicate their responsibility – can  civil society establish alternative forums grounded in legal principles?

Over the past decade, the tribunal format has been increasingly adopted in the arts as a political-aesthetic intervention – repositioning artistic practices with real-world struggles. Tribunals such as the NSU Tribunals of the Action Alliance “Unraveling the NSU Complex!”, the Congo Tribunal by Milo Rau and the International Institute for Political Murder, and the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes by Radha D'Souza and Jonas Staal impressively demonstrate how artistic practice, legal form, and political action can intersect. Aesthetic practices play a vital role in shaping these tribunals through their openness, affective force, and capacity to reimagine the very staging of justice. While conventional judicial proceedings mask their constructedness under the guise of objectivity and factuality, artistic formats deliberately foreground and creatively employ these dimensions of legal performance. They offer proposals for how spaces of justice might look and feel – continuing the shared history of tribunal, theater, and testimony.

This Peoples‘ Tribunal, organized as part of the 13th Berlin Biennale, follows this interweaving of law, art, and activism. Conceived as both an educational and mediating format, it exemplifies what art historian Maura Reilly calls "curatorial activism": a mediation practice that treats art spaces as social arenas in which power relations are actively contested and transformed, in this case through the format of a tribunal. The current proceedings address two instances: the repression of cultural rights in the Philippines and the suppression of freedom of expression and protest in Sudan.

In Berlin, too, protests in solidarity with Palestine and the assessment of Israel's war on Gaza as genocide have been heavily criminalized since October 2023. In response, activists have initiated the weekly People United Tribunals. Whether in Khartoum, Manila, or Berlin, civil society tribunals express a shared and urgent feeling that something is profoundly wrong. They anticipate a world that moves closer to justice – here and now – beyond the bounds of institutional legitimacy.

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