This Chamber’s mission will be to structure and guide the solicitation of witness, expert and other testimony and evidence to create a contemporary and historical record of crimes committed against Palestinians from 1948 to the present time. This should be done through the lens of overlapping and distinct international legal frameworks; that is, treaty-based and customary international law, including, but not limited to, the genocide and apartheid conventions and the Geneva and Hague conventions on laws of war, humanitarian law and belligerent occupation law (4th Geneva Convention). Aside from treaty and customary law, the Chamber should apply relevant UN resolutions – both General Assembly and Security Council – that underpin Palestinian human rights, highlighting their added value to the corpus of international law but also their deficiencies. There should be significant attention to the failure to apply international law norms to Palestinians both as a national entity and as individuals by powerful Western states, and the complicity of certain states with the commission of massive human and humanitarian law crimes against the Palestinian people until today.
This investigation is particularly critical and urgent in light of the groundbreaking opinions and decisions of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the pending warrant requests at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Despite the clear rulings from the highest courts in the world, Palestinian rights and protections have been ignored by the political bodies at the United Nations and the powerful actors in the global North. This Chamber will gather evidence not only of the criminal responsibility of the main perpetrators, but also the complicity of third states and actors in third states in perpetrating war crimes, crimes against humanity, aggression and genocide.
The Gaza Tribunal Project (GT) will include explicit ecocide and induced starvation dimensions as part of the deliberate atrocity-generating Israel campaign. Also the Chamber will take account of the relevance of the Advisory Opinion rulings of the ICJ with respect to Israel’s underlying administrative authority in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Finally, coverage of the GT should include treatment of the spillover effects of Gaza in Lebanon, Iran, Syria, and Yemen.
Having said that the most important role of the GT and this International Law Chamber concerns legitimacy and pedagogy, and only secondarily involves legality, is a crucial guideline for the work of the project. The primary challenge of the GT is to explain the main assessments of international law with an eye to stimulating civil society activism and justifying Palestinian resistance. It also extends to giving explicit as well as indirect support to solidarity initiatives, most notably, BDS, but also religiously motivated groups, organised labour, advocates of compliance with international law, humanitarian frameworks. In effect, if governments refuse to implement international law and the UN is incapable of doing so, then the peoples of the world have a responsibility and opportunity for doing so. To act in accord with these priorities the GP will shape the style and modes of procedure, verdict and media relations, selection of judges, chairs and role of chambers, etc. The IL Chamber will not attempt to mimic the professional juridical style of the ICJ, which features elaborate technical analyses of main legal issues, strictly defined. The GT will give priority to legally accurate and hopefully illuminating but non-technical and readable presentations of international law for the sake of media and public relevance.
This Chamber will be responsible for:
- drafting short memoranda regarding applicable law, including but not limited to, the international humanitarian law; human rights law; environmental law, including ecocide; Crime of Starvation and famine; the Genocide Convention; and the Apartheid Convention;
- suggesting questions that will most effectively get to the heart of these legal issues;
- identifying the role, complicity, and responsibility of third-party states as well as multilateral institutions;
- at the discretion of the panel of judges of the GT, responding to requests to clarify legal issues, conclusions and suggested remedies, especially, as grounded in the testimony of witnesses and experts at the Tribunal;
- briefly clarify connections of international law with Chambers 2 & 3.