The mission of Chamber Two is to identify and evaluate the degree to which the enforcement of international law is subordinate to the broader logic of political realism that privileges power over law in the event that the two behavioral authority paradigms clash.
Modern international law provides the substantive rules which strictly govern the conduct of wars, genocide, and humanitarian crises. And yet, because international law is not self-executing, the power to obtain compliance by targeted with these norms is dependent upon enforcement action the realm of international geopolitics rather than within the domain of the UN Security Council, where the five winners in World War II retain both permanent membership and an unrestricted right of veto.
In the setting of the Gaza Tribunal, Chamber Two will expose and critique the tensions between the adherence to international law by powerful states (particularly in the Global West) when doing so clashes with their geopolitical priorities. This will enable the Tribunal to identify the geopolitical impediments to resolving the Question of Palestine, and to advocate for the necessary and viable reforms to the geopolitical world order – especially at the United Nations – that will more closely subordinate politics to law, and power to justice.
In the urgent imperatives of the present this leads the GT to focus on encouraging nonviolent civil society initiatives by lending legitimacy and credibility to acts of solidarity with the Palestinian people struggling for their basic rights, none more so than the inalienable right of self-determination affirmed by both of the 1966 Covenants, which specify entitlements to human rights.
Chamber Two Undertakings:
- Gathering evidence and offering analysis that would illustrate civil society initiatives such as embargoing arms transfers to Israel, recommending trade and investment restrictions, and exerting pressure to end, or at least suspend, diplomatic and military relationships, especially to the extent supportive of and complicit with the crimes committed by Israel, which have blocked genocide-ending initiatives by the United Nations as implemented by permanent ceasefire arrangements and IDF withdrawal from Gaza.
- Critiquing the role of influential media in supporting Israel’s military campaign in Gaza; and
- Identifying the opportunities and responsibilities of governments, corporations, organized labor, faith-based groups, individuals, and multilateral institutions in ending the genocide.