An International War Crimes Tribunal has convened to assess the crimes of the US government and the Marcos and Duterte regimes against the Filipino people. The court provides a platform for victims and civil society to present evidence of war crimes, a form of grassroots justice. A similar People’s Tribunal model was used in 2018 to assess the Turkish government’s maltreatment of its Kurdish citizens.
“Unlike traditional courts or existing international accountability mechanisms that are easily influenced by imperialist interests, a people’s tribunal operates independently from governments and inter-governmental institutions alike,” the International Peoples’ Tribunal (IPT) noted.
As such, the ‘International War Crimes Tribunal on the US-directed Counterrevolutionary War in the Philippines’ joins a long heritage of People’s Tribunals first instigated with the 1966 Russell Tribunal in response to US crimes in Vietnam.
Following the 1979 establishment of the Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT) in Italy, the same format has been used to address diverse issues including the repression of minority rights, such as for Kurds in the Middle East, Sahrawis in the Western Sahara, and for the Tamil in Sri Lanka, as well as the policies of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and asylum rights in Europe.
The 2018 Kurdish v. Turkish government tribunal convened in Paris, to investigate alleged violations of international law and international humanitarian law by the Turkish Republic and its officials in their relations with the Kurdish people and their organisations. It assessed the impact of Turkey’s repression of Kurdish political activity, demonstrations and uprisings within its borders following the 2016 collapse of Turkish-Kurdish peace talks in 2016.
The tribunal concluded: “The tragedy that has been tormenting the Southeast of Anatolia, causing incalculable suffering to the Kurdish people, and which affects the Turkish people, is avoidable. It results from the errors, burdened by time, of a nationalistic dogma which in the past provoked the Armenian genocide. The Turkish and Kurdish people can avoid a similar fate.”
The Filipino People’s case against the US Government and the Marcos and Duterte regimes will operate “as a quasi-legal tribunal, following a structured legal process and guided by the standards of due process and credible evidence,” assisted by an international team of prosecutors.
The tribunal is set to address, “extrajudicial and summary killings of civilians and hors d’ combat, desecration of remains of combatants, the massacre of civilians and other forms of collective punishment, torture, enforced disappearances, mass arrests, indiscriminate firing, indiscriminate aerial bombing of communities and use of white phosphorus bombs,” among other crimes.
Rodrigo Duterte, former President of the Philippines, governed the Southeast Asian island nation from 2016 to 2022 based on an authoritarian-nationalist political programme, marked by summary extrajudicial killings of petty criminals and drug dealers. Incumbent President Bongbong Marcos is the son of former Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled the Philippines as a corrupt, US-backed authoritarian dictator from 1965 to 1986. President Marcos denies his father’s historical crimes, engages in fraud, and continues to engage in extrajudicial killing.
“The Marcos-Duterte ruling clique continue to cling to power, roaming free with impunity and complete disregard of international humanitarian law,” the PPT said.
“Countless cases of political killings mark the period in question, enforced disappearances, torture, and the widespread systematic suppression of dissent, with the full support and backing of the US government,” it added.
