Doctors, lawyers, witnesses: Gaza genocide put on trial by civil society in Sarajevo
Professor Richard Falk addresses the Gaza Tribunal in Sarajevo
Victoria Brittain reports in The Palestine Chronicle on 28 May 2025:
Doctors, lawyers and academics and witnesses to the ongoing genocide in Gaza are meeting in Sarajevo in the second phase of preparing a people’s tribunal on Gaza for later in the year.
This will echo the 1966 Russell-Sartre private people’s tribunal, which investigated and strongly criticised US foreign policy and military intervention in Vietnam. As with that one, evidence presented by witnesses from the frontline has moved the audience to tears.
Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher and Nobel Prize winner, and the leading French writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, were among those who set up the group, based, according to Russell, on the words of the post World War 2 Nuremberg War Crimes Trials chief prosecutor, Justice Robert H. Jackson: If certain acts and violations of Treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the US does them or Germany does them.
We are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.
Former UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, Canadian law professor Michael Lynk, opened the meeting evoking war crimes of Guernica, Dresden, Rwanda, Beirut, and then Gaza, subjected to “a medieval siege, and now an open-air cemetery.”