Russell Tribunal


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, Lázaro Cárdenas and several others. The tribunal investigated and evaluated American foreign policy and military intervention in Vietnam.
Bertrand Russell justified the establishment of this body as follows:
The tribunal was constituted in November 1966, and was conducted in two sessions in 1967, in Stockholm, Sweden and Roskilde, Denmark. Bertrand Russell's book on the armed confrontations underway in Vietnam, War Crimes in Vietnam, was published in January 1967. His postscript called for establishing this investigative body. The findings of the tribunal were largely ignored in the United States.
Further tribunals were also held on various other issues, including psychiatry, human rights, and the Israel–Palestine conflict and, most recently, on the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir.

Composition and origin

The idea for the tribunal was first proposed to Russell in 1965 by M.S. Arnoni. Representatives of 18 countries participated in the tribunal's two sessions. The tribunal committee, which called itself the International War Crimes Tribunal, consisted of 25 notable individuals, predominantly from peace organisations, including winners of the Nobel Prize, Medals of Valor, and awards of recognition in humanitarian and social fields. Neither Vietnam nor the United States was directly represented by any individual on the 25-member panel, although a couple of members were American citizens.
More than 30 people, including military personnel from the United States, and both of the warring factions in Vietnam, gave evidence to the tribunal. Financing for the Tribunal included a large contribution from the North Vietnamese government after a request made by Russell to Ho Chi Minh.

Tribunal members

Other intellectuals were invited but eventually rejected this invitation for various reasons:
The Tribunal aims were stated as follows:

Evidence presented at the Tribunal

During the First Tribunal Session in Stockholm, testimony and evidence was produced by the following witnesses :
  • Gabriel Kolko, American historian
  • Jean Chesneaux, French historian
  • Charles Fourniau, French historian, journalist and playwright
  • Leon Matarasso, French jurist
  • Samuel Rosenwein, American constitutional lawyer
  • Abraham Behar, French M.D.
  • John Takman, Swedish M.D. and parliamentarian
  • Axel Höjer, Swedish M.D. and UN official
  • Marta Rojas, Cuban author and revolutionary
  • Alejo Carpentier, Cuban author
  • Charles Cobb, American journalist and field secretary of the SNCC
  • Julius Lester, American author and civil rights activist
  • Fujio Yamazaki, Japanese scientist, Professor of Agriculture
  • Makato Kandachi, Japanese scientist
  • Joe Neilands, American scientist
  • Malcolm Caldwell, British journalist and academic
  • Do Van Ngoc, 9-year-old Vietnamese napalm bombing survivor
  • Ngo Thi Nga, Vietnamese teacher
  • Martin Birnstingl, British surgeon
During the Second Tribunal Session in Roskilde, testimony and evidence was produced by the following witnesses :
  • Peter Martinsen, American veteran, 541st Military Intelligence Detachment
  • Donald Duncan, American veteran, Army Special Forces
  • David Kenneth Tuck, American veteran, 25th Infantry Division
  • Wilfred Burchett, Australian journalist
  • Erich Wulff, German M.D.
  • Masahiro Hashimoto, Japanese M.D.
  • Gilbert Dreyfus, French M.D., Professor of Biochemistry
  • Alexandre Minkowski, M.D., Professor of Pediatrics
  • Madelaine Riffaud, French journalist
  • Roger Pic, French photo journalist
  • Pham Thi Yen, Vietnamese pharmacist, former political prisoner
  • Thai Binh Danh, Vietnamese farmworker, napalm bombing survivor
  • Edgar Ledeer, French scientist
  • Stanley Faulkner, American civil rights attorney
  • Yves Jouffa, French jurist and activist

    Conclusions and verdicts

The Tribunal stated that its conclusions were:
Prompted in part by the My Lai Massacre, in 1969 the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation organised Citizens Commissions of Inquiry to hold hearings intended to document testimony of war crimes in Indochina. These hearings were held in several American cities, and would eventually form the foundation of two national investigations: the National Veterans Inquiry sponsored by the CCI, and the Winter Soldier Investigation sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

Reasoning for verdicts

Verdict 11: Genocide

was an investigator for the Tribunal and documented that the United States was bombing hospitals, schools and other civilian targets in Vietnam. He offers first hand and documentary evidence about US war crimes. His book provides many details of US atrocities and shows the larger motivation for the Tribunal on the accusation of genocide rests from the clear need to expose documented atrocities against civilians rather than an actual ongoing genocide.
Jean-Paul Sartre bases his argument for genocide on several reasons, but part of it rests on statements and declarations from US leaders and intention rather than conduct. "In particular, we must try to understand whether there is an intention of genocide in the war that the American government is fighting against Vietnam. Article 2 of the Convention of 1948 defines genocide on the basis of intention." And that "Recently, Dean Rusk has declared: 'We are defending ourselves... It is the United States that is in danger in Saigon. This means that their first aim is military: it is to encircle Communist China, the major obstacle to their expansionism. Thus, they will not let south-east Asia escape. America has put men in power in Thailand, it controls part of Laos and threatens to invade Cambodia. But these conquests will be useless if the US has to face a free Vietnam with thirty-one million united people." Furthermore that "At this point in our discussion, three facts emerge: the US government wants a base and an example; this can be achieved, without any greater obstacle than the resistance of the Vietnamese people themselves, by liquidating an entire people and establishing a Pax Americana on a Vietnamese desert; to attain the second, the US must achieve, at least partially, this extermination."

Subsequent tribunals

Additional tribunals using the same model and the denomination Russell Tribunal have been held. The Second Russell Tribunal on Latin America was held over three sessions that spanned three years and focused on human rights violations during the military dictatorships in Argentina and Brazil and on Chile's military coup d'état. The third tribunal focused on the situation of Human Rights in Germany. The fourth tribunal focused on the rights of the Indians of the Americas. Subsequent tribunals focused on the Threat of Indigenous Peoples of America, on Human Rights in Psychiatry, on Iraq, and on Palestine.
At the closing session of the Russell Tribunal the creation of three new institutions was announced: the International Foundation for the Rights and Liberations of Peoples, and the International League for the Rights and Liberations of Peoples, and the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal.
The Permanents People's Tribunal was established in Bologna on 23 June 1979. Between its founding and April 1984, the tribunal pronounced two advisory opinions on Western Sahara and Eritrea and held eight sessions. The latter was concluded in January 1983 in Madrid.
A special hearing was conducted in Paris on 13–16 April 1984 to investigate the Armenian genocide. The Tribunal's 35-member panel included three Nobel Prize winners—Seán MacBride, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Professor George Wald— and ten eminent jurist, theologians, academics and political figures. The tribunal concluded that genocide was already prohibited by law at the time the Armenian Genocide took place - that though not explicitly banned by written rules it was not legally tolerated - thus the 1948 International Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was formally expressing an already existing prohibition. The tribunal concluded that the massacres of Armenians between 1915 and 1917 revealed the intention of the systematic extermination of the Armenian people, intent as specified in article II of the 1948 convention, and that it was undoubtedly a genocide, the manifestation of a policy that had emerged in the Ottoman Empire in the 1890s. The tribunal criticised as unacceptable the denial of the genocide by Turkish governments since the establishment of the Kemalist republic.
More than three decades later, the Russell Tribunal model was followed by the World Tribunal on Iraq, which was held to make a similar analysis of the Project for the New American Century, the 2003 Invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation of Iraq, and the links between these.