From 27 to 29 June, the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on West Papua was in session. Convened at Queen Mary University of London, the tribunal spent three days hearing testimonies to assess allegations of environmental destruction and repression in West Papua at the hands of the Indonesian Government and various corporate actors. A frequently faltering Zoom room allowed witnesses from West Papua to call in and audiences outside of London, me among their number, to follow the proceedings.
The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal was established in 1979 by Italian activist and politician Lelio Basso. Basso had previously participated in the Russell Tribunal of 1967, the first and most well-known peoples’ tribunal that held the United States responsible for violating international law in the Vietnam War. Peoples’ tribunals are assemblies that behave like courts but lack any authorization from states or international organizations to do so. The Rome-based Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal is a serial organizer of peoples’ tribunals, this session on West Papua being its 53rd. The organization’s workings are outlined in its statute.
The tribunal’s presidency decided to organize a session on West Papua in response to a request from a coalition of NGOs. A team of prosecutors, two of whom are based in West Papua, put together an indictment that levels a long list of accusations against the Indonesian state centering around land grabbing, violent repression, and environmental degradation. A panel of seven, including scholars, a journalist, and one former judge, was appointed to consider these charges in London.
After the session, on 8 August, the tribunal made clear that it sided with the prosecution in a preliminary statement. While this preliminary statement will be presented during the next session of the UN Human Rights Council, the full—and likely lengthy—judgment is still to come.
As peoples’ tribunals operate outside of the realm of formal law, they enjoy unparalleled freedom to craft legal interventions that best suit their protagonists’ political objectives. Where activists who try to mediate their interventions through official law and fora have to jump through hoops of doctrine, procedure, and the will of the powerful, peoples’ tribunals can pick and choose what they want of law. What kinds of interventions do activists craft with all this freedom?
For the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal session on West Papua, I argue, the choice to gather as a court was most consequential for how it led the group of activists to think. While some participants hoped that staging a trial would help change the law or change minds, little became of these plans. The tribunal instead unfolded as an inquiry into the situation in West Papua.
That this inquiry took the form of a trial hampered it more than helped. It meant that those who knew least about the situation in West Papua were put in charge of the inquiry as judges. The individuals testifying, in contrast, had minimal agency in shaping the larger story that the tribunal would tell on the basis of their individual testimonies. And this larger story was one fitting of a show trial: It dramatized what already was common ground among those gathered, while steering free from disagreement and doubt.
A Tribunal for West Papua
The judges, witnesses, and organizers of the tribunal gathered first and foremost in support of the West Papuan cause. David Whyte, a professor affiliated with Queen Mary’s Centre for Climate Crime and Climate Justice, explained the Centre’s decision to host the tribunal in a news story on Queen Mary’s website titled “Why We are Hosting a Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on West Papua”. Whyte’s explanation is that doing so is in line with “our mission to expose the political and economic actors that through their actions are exacerbating the climate crisis”. The judges were equally forthright, writing that they “came to this session appalled by the level of destruction that West Papua and West Papuans have endured” (p. 2).
But why pursue politics by means of a pretend trial? Answers to this question by protagonists of this, as well as other, peoples’ tribunals are surprisingly inchoate. Of course, “why not” goes a long way—it is worth a try. But once at work, the tribunal was in need of a more developed strategy to decide what to do with its creative freedom. The judges openly toyed with this question, asking witnesses just how the tribunal could, in their view, best help pursue their cause.
The answers largely pointed to the channels through which official international law works in the world. One witness urged the tribunal to put pressure on the international community to, in turn, put pressure on Indonesia to stop grabbing West Papuan land. Another witness remarked that “if your tribunal comes with an indictment that reaffirms what we have been screaming for sixty years, then we can go around the world and say ‘these are not just the words of West Papuans but of experts.’” In short, these witnesses hoped that the tribunal would add force to its message by coating it in law.
But international law’s authority is not easy to come by. While peoples’ tribunals can pick and choose what they want of international law, its authority is, in all likelihood, off the table. This is first because of the birth defect of lacking official authorization. And second, because peoples’ tribunals, generally consisting of like-minded individuals who seek to make a political intervention, are bound to be perceived as failing to live up to law’s central promise of objectivity. For these reasons, the press and the public are unlikely to listen as attentively and deferentially to peoples’ tribunals as they do to official courts. States have an additional reason not to engage with peoples’ tribunals, as peoples’ tribunals try to use law as a legitimizing resource, a resource which states would rather not share. The activists’ message to the international community is accordingly unlikely to pick up force as a result of being pronounced by a tribunal.
The Tribunal and the Law
Another witness expressed the hope that the tribunal would change the law rather than minds, submitting that “it is time to imagine a law not existing … a law to come”. The tribunal’s ability to take its guidance from a law it wishes for is, in his view, “the truly exciting part about the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal.” In this vein, peoples’ tribunals have been understood as prefigurative projects. The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal has a rich prefigurative tradition. Many of its sessions expound on the Algiers Declaration of 1976, another initiative spearheaded by Lelio Basso, which seeks to put anticolonial ideals in the form of a human rights convention.
But the session on West Papua cannot be said to have prefigured a better law, as its engagement with substantive law did not reach beyond a general critique of it. The indictment explains that the international law having to bear on West Papua falls short. While the accusations it voices concern a “large number of breaches of fundamental rights in international law”, it “at the same time extends far beyond a self-contained set of breaches to fundamental rights in international law” (p. 11), noting, for instance, that “customary rights” are “not set out well in international legal standards (p. 8)”.
In accusing the Indonesian state of a list of wrongs, the indictment only loosely gestures to legal obligations and terminology. The list includes “taking the ancestral land of the Indigenous Papuan people against their will”, “violent repression … as a means of furthering industrial development”, and “|environmental degradation” (p. 3). The indictment mentions that these wrongs undoubtedly correspond to a host of wrongs as recognized by international law, but only as a besides: the lawyerly work of narrating how precisely some specific right has been violated is nowhere to be found.
Once gathered in London, the tribunal continued to rely minimally on international law in its analysis. Notably, none of the 29 scheduled testimonies was principally concerned with international law. This is in contrast to, for instance, the Russell Tribunal on Vietnam, which called upon various lawyers to set out relevant bodies of law. In short, the tribunal showed little concern for legal norms—existing or to come.
One explanation for the tribunal’s lack of interest in prefiguring a better law could be that it saw no point in trying to rescue the law. The indictment remarks that “colonial legal paradigms – whether Indonesian or European in their origin, cannot restore the relationship between the rights of the people and the rights of the earth.” Does that mean we should invest our hopes in a different legal paradigm? Perhaps not, as the “fundamentally unequal social and economic relationships” at the root of the West Papuan situation “are unlikely to be resolved by law.” (p. 11) Does “law” here mean the present law or law at all?
The Tribunal as an Inquiry
Done away with the idea that the tribunal format would help change the law or change minds, the tribunal meets the eye as a gathering of activists who, collectively and over an extended period of time, tried to make sense of the situation in West Papua. From this perspective, the significance of the tribunal format resides in how it guided the activists gathered to think.
Notably, the group did not take all the guidance from the format of a trial that it could. The roles of prosecutor, judge, and witness were, for instance, not kept to all that strictly. When a witness living outside of West Papua was asked about the situation in West Papua, the room quickly decided that it made more sense for one of the prosecutors calling in from West Papua to tackle that question.
But in so far as the guidance of the trial format was taken up, it proved unhelpful in many respects. A first oddity was that, of the dozens of individuals gathered in the room and on Zoom, those least informed about the situation in West Papua were in charge. The witnesses were selected based on their various forms of expertise relating to the matter at hand; the judges were not. In official proceedings, judges are meant to bring to their work knowledge of the law only, so as to otherwise approximate the objectivity of a blank slate. In this case, blank meant only empty.
Were the uninitiated best placed to lead the inquiry? The question is best answered in reference to the judges’ work, the most significant part of which—the judgment—is still to come. But it does not help that much of the judges’ work is hidden from sight. Sticking to the format, the judges made many of their decisions behind closed doors. Similar opaqueness surrounds the indictment and the program for the meeting. The result of this is that the structure of the analysis that the tribunal developed during its meeting was already largely in place by the time it gathered in London, where others could share in the proceedings. The people testifying could tell their stories, but it was for the judges and the tribunal’s organizers to decide what larger story their testimonies told.
The format of a trial not only provided a distribution of roles for thinking together; it also provided a frame for how to think. Moved by their shared political outlook, the activists, understandably, put on something of a show trial. The judges concluded that the various testimonies together “paint a picture of human and environmental catastrophe” (p. 2). Getting all these interwoven wrongs into view is an important endeavor. But three days of proceedings left me wondering what was left unsaid.
Specifically, the group left no clues as to what it disagreed about, or about what its members harbored doubts—typical focal points for collective thinking. The format of a trial steered clear of difficult questions. Arguments were made rather than considered. Questions only added force and detail to the sketched hellscape. (“Are things getting worse?” “Yes, they are”; “Is the British state also responsible?” “Yes, and so are Australia and the U.S.”)
With anticipation, I awaited the closing statements, where a court-appointed defense counsel would speak. Echoing official statements of the Indonesian state (which unsurprisingly had decided not to participate in the proceedings), the defense called upon the importance of economic development and the fight against terrorism, and flat out denied responsibility for wrongdoing. Everyone in the room agreed that this was beside the point. The judges, in their preliminary statement, simply brushed the defense’s arguments aside as “nonsense” (p. 7).
Conclusion
Peoples’ tribunals pick and choose what they want of law. But it is not easy to put law to one’s use. The activists gathered in the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal session on West Papua came to London with different ideas as to why they were staging a trial. As the gathering unfolded, it became clear that the choice of the tribunal format was most significant for how it led the activists to think. And it is far from clear whether the format of a trial was helpful for thinking things through.
It is strange to look at a trial as a procedure for thinking, because trials normally serve other, more salient and important, functions. But when trials serve other functions, when they, say, adjudicate upon disputes and develop norms, it is easy to overlook that they simultaneously provide a peculiar format for thinking about the world. What I have meant to suggest is that looking at how peoples’ tribunals pick and choose law helps illustrate not only what law has to offer, but also what law does.
"The current labor challenges are very complex due to various factors that must be considered optimally," she observed while opening the 9th National Instructor Skills Competition (KKIN) here on Tuesday.
According to her, the condition of the global political economy will remain volatile as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has projected world economic growth of just 2.9 percent this year.
The economies of developed countries are expected to experience sluggish growth of just 1.4 percent on average, while emerging countries such as China, India, Russia, and Brazil are projected to grow by 4 percent.
Meanwhile, the economies of Indonesia and four other ASEAN countries are projected to grow by 4.5 percent.
Digitalization and the green economy are some other challenges that are affecting the world.
Fauziyah explained that digitalization has supported the growth of the green economy, which has made the job market more flexible with demand emerging for new skills.
"Another challenge is the demographic bonus. People aged 18–24 years dominate the population, and this brings a big challenge in terms of creating jobs to handle unemployment among young people," she said.
She also listed the challenges caused by a change in job types and skillsets.
"The question is: Are we ready to face the change? This country still has a challenge, which is that 53 percent of its workforce only graduated junior high school or below. They are working in the informal sector and low-skill jobs," she said.
According to the minister, these challenges must be answered with comprehensive and real strategies, such as improving skills and vocational education and training through cross-stakeholder collaboration.
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Translator: Yuvensius B, Kenzu
Editor: Azis Kurmala
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