International War Crimes Tribunal

The Russell Tribunal, also known as the International War Crimes Tribunal, Russell-Sartre Tribunal, or Stockholm Tribunal, was a private body organised by British philosopher and Nobel Prize winner Bertrand Russell and hosted by French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre. Along with Lelio Basso, Ken Coates, Ralph Schoenman, Julio Cortázar and several others, the tribunal investigated and evaluated American foreign policy and military intervention in Vietnam, following the 1954 defeat of French forces at Diên Biên Phu and the establishment of North and South Vietnam. The tribunal did not investigate alleged war crimes by the Viet Cong; Schoenman commented: "Lord Russell would think no more of doing that than of trying the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto for their uprising against the Nazis."

Bertrand Russell justified the establishment of this body as follows:

If certain acts and violations of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether 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.

The tribunal was constituted in November 1966, and was conducted in two sessions in 1967, in , Sweden and Roskilde, Denmark. Bertrand Russell's book on the situation in Vietnam, War Crimes in Vietnam, was published in January 1967, and included a postscript describing his call for this investigative body. The tribunal was largely ignored in the United States.

Further tribunals were set up in the following decades on the same model, using the denomination Russell Tribunal. E.g. Russell Tribunal on Latin America focused on human rights violations in dictatorships of Argentina and Brazil (Rome, 1973), on Chile's military coup d'état (Rome, 1974–76), on Human Rights in Psychiatry (Berlin, 2001), on Iraq (Brussels, 2004), and on Palestine (Barcelona, 2009–12). A hearing of the Russell-Sartre Tribunal was announced in Venice (23 August 2014) on human rights issues in the East Ukraine war.

Representatives of 18 countries participated in the two sessions of this tribunal, formally calling itself the International War Crimes Tribunal. The tribunal committee consisted of 25 notable personages, predominantly from leftist peace organisations. Many of these individuals were winners of the Nobel Prize, Medals of Valor and awards of recognition in humanitarian and social fields. There was no direct representation of Vietnam or the United States on this 25 member panel, although a couple of members were American citizens.

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