The Sarajevo Declaration of the Gaza Tribunal was released Thursday morning, following three days of public hearings at the International University of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“We believe that the world is approaching a dangerous precipice, the front edge of which is in Palestine,” a People’s Tribunal on the Gaza genocide declared today in Sarajevo, and “dangerous forces” are “pushing us toward the abyss.”
Inspired by past People’s Tribunals — most notably the 1966 Russell Tribunal on the US war on Vietnam, and the 2003-2005 World Tribunal on the US’s war on Iraq – the Gaza Tribunal was launched in London in November 2024.
Faced with a “total failure of the organised international community to implement international law in the most severe, visible case of genocide in real time,” the Gaza Tribunal’s website states, it aims to legitimize “an alternative paradigm of international law, one that derives its authority from people and their sense of justice rather than relying solely on governments and their institutions.”
The Gaza Tribunal is governed by an eight-member Steering Committee headed by Richard Falk, Emeritus Professor of International Law and former US Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine, assisted by a 29-member Advisory Policy Council of civil society leaders and public intellectuals from Palestine, Europe and North America. Among these: Diana Buttu, Susan Abulhawa, Mouin Rabbani, Raja Shehadeh, Ghassan Abu Sittah, Mazin Qumsiyeh, Cornel West, Judith Butler, Yanis Varoufakis, Tariq Ali, Mary Kaldor, Naomi Klein, and Jeremy Corbyn.
The Tribunal’s final judgement will be rendered by a ‘Jury of Conscience’ composed of a half dozen judges, following closing hearings in Istanbul in late October. That judgement, together with personal testimony, civil society submissions, and closing reports from each of the Tribunal’s three Chambers, will be incorporated into a set of public archives that will remain open for continuing submissions.
Alongside its condemnation of the Gaza genocide, now into its nineteenth month, today’s Sarajevo Declaration condemns Israel’s “decades-long policies and practices of settler colonialism, ethno-supremacism, apartheid, racial segregation, persecution, unlawful settlements, the denial of the right to return, collective punishment, mass detention, torture and cruel and inhuman treatment and punishment, extrajudicial executions, systematic sexual violence, demolitions, forced displacement and expulsions, ethnic purges and forced demographic change, forced starvation, the systematic denial of all economic and social rights, and extermination.”
“We are horrified by the Israeli regime’s systematic devastation of Palestinian lives,” the Sarajevo Declaration says, “including its intentional destruction of all sources and systems for food, water, healthcare, education, housing, culture, as well as mosques, churches, aid facilities, and refugee shelters, and its targeting of medical personnel, journalists, aid workers, and United Nations staff, and its direct targeting of civilians, including children and older persons, women and men, girls and boys, persons with disabilities and those with medical conditions.”
The Declaration calls for an “immediate withdrawal” of Israeli forces from Gaza, now largely in ruins, an end to forced displacement of its people, resumption of humanitarian aid, and compensation to the UN and other humanitarian groups for the destruction of their Gaza facilities.
It also calls for an end to Israel’s West Bank settlement enterprise, the release of all Palestinian prisoners, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanese and Syrian territory, and financial restitution to the Palestinian people.
The Declaration recognizes “the right of the Palestinian people to resist foreign occupation, colonial domination, apartheid, subjugation by a racist regime, and aggression, including through the use of armed struggle,” and their “non-negotiable and axiomatic” right to self-determination.
As for the Western powers who’ve supported, defended, shielded, and participated in Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza – up to now – they must place a comprehensive arms embargo on the Zionist regime, suspend it from international organizations, abide by provisional measures orders issued against Israel by the International Court of Justice, and execute arrest warrants against Israeli leaders, issued last November by the International Criminal Court, the Gaza Tribunal declares.
An unlikely scenario, the Tribunal suggests.
“[Both] key international organizations and most countries of the world … have failed in defending the human rights of the Palestinian people and in responding to the Israeli regime’s genocide in Palestine,” the Sarajevo Declaration states, and these duties now fall to “people of conscience everywhere, to civil society and to social movements.”
Today’s Sarajevo Declaration comes at the close of three days of livestreamed hearings, featuring a wealth of historical, political, cultural, and media analysis of Israel’s ‘livestreamed’ genocidal assault on Gaza, alongside searing personal accounts by Gazans and physicians who’ve struggled to treat the injured, especially Gaza’s children – the largest cohort of child amputees the world has ever seen.
The complicity of the global media
Special opprobrium was reserved for the corporate media.
“We denounce the … shameful role of many media corporations in covering up the genocide, dehumanizing Palestinians, and in the dissemination of propaganda fueling anti-Palestinian racism, war crimes, and genocide,” today’s Declaration states.
This is the “time of monsters,” Penny Green, Professor of Law and Globalisation at Queen Mary University of London, and the Tribunal’s acting chair, told the Tribunal, citing Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s comments on the rise of European fascism.
“We must always remember that while the media will try to describe and present this as a humanitarian crisis, this is a crisis created by monsters,” said Green. “And we must do our best to ensure that we fight the monsters at every level that we can.”
In promulgating Western government framing of the Gaza genocide, corporate media should recall what happened to Nazi publisher and propagandist Julius Streicher, British-Palestinian journalist Lauren Booth told the Tribunal.
“Julius Streicher, at the Nuremberg trials, was convicted,” said Booth. “He was convicted, not of violence, not of partaking in violence, not of carrying a gun. He was convicted because his speeches and his writings were found to have contributed to genocide. He was hanged.”
Mainstream news organizations have made themselves the “enablers of this genocide,” American literary critic Saree Makdisi told the Tribunal.
“This violence, we are told over and over and over again, began as though out of the blue when Hamas attacked Israel,” said Makdisi. “Stopping one clock on October 7th is exactly what makes the other clock, the clock of genocide, run.”
Only an informed public can stop the genocide clock, the Tribunal was told.
“These tribunals arise only when governments and their institutions fail or refuse to address severe injustices,” Tribunal President Richard Falk told the gathering.
“I am counting on what I call the gravitas of a wakened people to do what governments refuse to do,” said Falk. “Namely to bring this ordeal to an end and defeat the plans for further extermination and forced departure from Gaza of the Palestinians who survive.”