Jessica Elias tackles the gaps limiting the formal international courts in The Hague and explains how people’s tribunals can address them. Reflecting on one such recent people’s tribunal, the Gaza Tribunal, the author argues that this legal space offers a valuable comprehensive approach to the assault on the people of Gaza, even though it has not been backed by the State-centric international legal system.
TWAILR: Reflections ~ 78/2025
On 1 November 2024 in a conference room in London that I attended in my capacity as a researcher of informal sites of justice, a group of legal experts and former United Nations (UN) experts, along with several legal Palestinian non-governmental civil society organisations, came together for the first time to initiate the establishment of the Gaza Tribunal. Gathering later in Sarajevo from 26 to 29 May 2025 with Richard Falk as its President, the first public session of the Gaza Tribunal took place. The session ended with the reading of the Sarajevo declaration, after witnesses had presented their testimonies and the assembly called for a comprehensive roadmap for international action. The work of the Tribunal subsequently culminated in its final session in Istanbul from 23 to 26 October 2025. The final session ended with the reading by the Jury of Conscience of the Istanbul verdict. The Jury is active, unlike in the Sarajevo declaration, in producing the final verdict after evaluating the evidence presented. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has also found that a ’plausible genocide’, has been unfolding since 2024, one that has claimed tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of victims by October 2025. The Gaza Tribunal has taken place against the background of the ongoing genocide that Israel has been committing on the civilian population of Gaza as confirmed by the report of the UN Commission of Inquiry and countless other organisations.
The Gaza Tribunal is not the only legal initiative or court to address the situation in Gaza. Other more ‘formal spaces’ of justice, such as the ICJ and the International Criminal Court (ICC), are also considering different legal arguments brought forward regarding Gaza. Since each of these courts and tribunals is addressing heinous crimes in Gaza, there is a benefit for scholars of international law to observe the glaring differences in their distinct jurisprudential paradigms.
In this reflection I argue that the Gaza Tribunal, as a space created outside the remits of formal justice, contributes to filling some of the gaps of the official international legal process. Not as an alternative to formal courts in The Hague, but as a model that can push the boundaries of formal spaces of justice to overcome the shortcomings of public international law and international criminal law orders.
The Modes of Justice: fast and slow
The mode question speaks to a relationship between two modes of doing justice: the fast and the slow. This expression does not mean the ‘speed’ of the process of justice. It is borrowed from Daniel Kahneman’s popular psychological book Thinking, Fast and Slow. He connects the fast/slow modes by which humans think or solve problems to the framing choices and biases that anchor their judgment. While the ‘fast’ system prompts automatic or stereotypic answers or rather reflexes, the ‘slow’ system is characterized by the production of an effortful, infrequent, calculating, and conscious response (as opposed to ‘reflex’). In the same vein, this reflection will consider formal courts through the lens of ‘fast justice’ and informal spaces of justice through ‘slow justice’. The reflection grapples with the different systems of justice and their framing choices and structural biases that anchor their final judgment, to offer a critique of ‘fast justice’.
Justice fast
To start with, the ICJ is part of the model of ‘fast justice’ even if its work is temporally slower than that of the Gaza Tribunal (while the Gaza Tribunal is part of the model of ‘slow justice’ even if it concludes its process quicker than the Hague courts). The framing choices of the ICJ and other international courts in The Hague are anchored in the long history of international law. That framework designates a straight-jacket procedure led by an almost ‘automatic’ bureaucracy that centres around a state-system, which is what renders it ‘fast’.
The ICJ’s procedure involves hearings extended over several years in the aim of delivering decisions by fifteen judges from different regions of the world. At the time of writing, there have been more than 750 days of public broadcasted violations of international law by Israeli forces in Palestine since the attacks of 7th October 2023. Despite the gravity of the situation, the strict procedure of formal courts is not catalysed to render a final judgment any sooner. Even more so, the ICJ’s Provisional Measures Orders in the South Africa v. Israel genocide case initially fell short of ordering a ceasefire as such and as requested by South Africa, even though it had been the case that the ICJ had previously ordered Russia to halt the military offenses against Ukraine. Nevertheless, the bureaucracy has reached a point where the ICJ has ‘named’ genocide in the Orders in the South Africa case, has declared Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory to be illegal in its July 2024 Advisory Opinion, and has most recently given a further Advisory Opinion to the General Assembly regarding Israel’s legal obligations towards the UN. The ICJ’s procedures still impose limitations—often softening the impact of measures supported by the majority of states, such as a cease-fire. By contrast, the legal hesitation that dominated the 2024 orders of the ICJ, does not pose a limiting factor on the Gaza Tribunal ‘s comprehensive response.
The spectrum of themes that the Gaza Tribunal addresses encompasses much more than the legal aspects of justice. As such, the Tribunal goes to great lengths to overcome narrow interpretations by addressing the Gaza situation ‘through its historical, political, philosophical, and legal dimensions’. The Tribunal is in a better position to contribute to (an effective) ceasefire by giving civil society organisations, citizens, former UN chiefs, and legal experts a platform to frame the crimes not only legally but also historically and politically. It does so by informing the masses and giving them the legal tools that empower them to take action. The idea would be to leverage the pressure of the masses on their respective States to enact the demands of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctionsmovement and to prevent the supply of resources, arms and technology to the genocidal occupation regime in Palestine. Such activism and civil society engagement, with people marching in their millions in public spaces, may have had a role to play for instance in raising the leverage for the belated joint statement of Britain, France and Canada calling for immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
The specific structure and approach of the Gaza Tribunal requires an array of different chambers to apply different lenses in their deliberations, something that international courts cannot do. The Tribunal’s structure consists of a Steering Committee, the Advisory Policy Council, several Administrative Units, three specialized Chambers, and a Jury of Conscience. The different chambers are the International Relations and World Order Chamber, a Chamber for History, Ethics, and Philosophy, and a Chamber for International Law. Together, they answer the ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions that Hannah Arendt was referring to in her coverage of the Eichmann trial. For example, The International Law Chamber is steered by the Advisory Policy Council (including Yanis Varoufakis, Judith Butler, and Jeremy Corbyn) to study the relationship between the arms trade and the private business involved in Israeli drone strikes in Gaza. The final Istanbul verdict attests to covering collusion with Israel, Israel’s commission of genocide through provision of diplomatic cover, weapons, weapon parts, intelligence, military assistance and training, and continuing economic relations. In her latest report, Francesca Albanese confirms the comprehensive evidence presented in the Gaza Tribunal through exposing a collective effort of 63 States in obscuring, ignoring, and profiting from Israel’s violations of international law ‘through military, economic, diplomatic and even “humanitarian” channels’.
Alas, the model of ‘fast justice’ is one that takes many years and moves slowly. At this stage, the date of the final judgment of the case of South Africa v. Israel at the ICJ is not likely to come before 2027. The Gaza Tribunal rendered its final judgment in October 2025 which is already two years since October 7th. The Gaza Tribunal also delivered its public reading of the accusation and declaration in May 2025. Despite the time and energy required of all involved working on a voluntary basis, these findings were delivered long before the ICJ is expected to decide. Previous popular tribunals responded even more immediately, including the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, which held hearings and issued its judgment within two months of the beginning of Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza.
In its own turn and at its own procedural pace, the ICC was criticised for spending eight months before processing the prosecutor’s request for arrest warrants and another five months for the warrants to be issued. As the formal space for adjudicating on the four heinous crimes (crime against humanity, war crimes, genocide, and aggression), the ICC delivered warrants calling for the arrest of five leaders (two from Israel and three from Hamas, although the latter have all been killed by Israel after the warrants were released). ICC Prosecutors’ staff and judges were publiclythreatened by many U.S. Republican senators if arrest warrants were to be issued for Israeli leaders. Despite the arrest warrant for Israeli prime minister Netanyahu, liberal Western ICC member states such as France have sought to undermine the warrant and the ICC itself with claims that Netanyahu is entitled to immunity.
Moreover, international criminal procedure still relies on States as the primary building blocks of its operation. This ‘ready-made’ model of justice is fast but has its disadvantages. The international legal system continues to garner power within a State-based system that governs who, what, when, and how the law is spoken in any given space of justice. Justice must emanate from the State apparatus which is involved in every step of the process of formal spaces of justice and even prior to their establishment. In the case of South Africa v. Israel, it was South Africa, a State that is effectively a continent away from Palestine, that chose to bring the case of Gaza forward to the ICJ. In terms of jurisdiction, the ICJ remains constrained by the principle that it can only hear a case between States that have consented to its jurisdiction. Subsequently, every court/tribunal has had to garner enough support for the legitimacy to pursue only a certain crime of genocide defined by a limited jurisdiction temporarily or geographically. The ICJ is not, for instance, examining directly the role and responsibility of international arms companies in Gaza genocide, and does not consider either the increase in oil exportation to Israel by tens of States nor the technological support provided by the British government (this latter point was, by contrast, addressed by another people’s tribunal in the form of the Inquiry into British Complicity in Israeli War Crimes in Gaza convened by Jeremy Corbyn in September 2025).
Similarly at the ICC, which is looking into several specific Gaza situations, the bias towards working with States and therefore being constrained by State politics, is part of the story of why none of the Court’s cases on Palestine have yet advanced to the trial phase. ‘Fast justice’ is subject to the ready-made structural biases of the legal system which are inherently deferential to certain forms of state power. The model of ‘fast justice’ also has a strict understanding of legitimacy of legal courts which involves the type of knowledge allowed to be disseminated by the procedure. That means that types of knowledge that may help address the entirety of the case at hand are not allowed in the legal procedure the courts. I refer here to the observation of German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt who wrote in her reports of the Eichmann trial in 1963 Jerusalem for the New York Times:
Justice demands that the accused be prosecuted, defended, and judged, and that all the other seemingly greater import – of “How could it happen?” and “Why did it happen?,” of “Why the Jews?” and “Why the Germans?,” of “What was the role of other nations” and “What was the co-responsibility on the side of the Allies?” [emphasis added]
The above quote demonstrates the significance of the questions ‘left in abeyance’ as information that is traditionally not addressed by the narrow legal procedure—information that could have helped prevent those crimes that were perpetrated against the Jews in Europe from ever happening again. If only the “how” and “why” of genocide had been addressed and demystified in the trial. Ironically, the Jewish State of Israel stands today in the position of the defendant who not only needs to be “prosecuted, defended, and judged” as Arendt put it, but who also needs to answer to the wider questions of international civil society organisations. Certainly, the Gaza Tribunal does not seem to aspire for the narrow justice of the trial that Arendt had attended. It aims in its breadth and depth of scrutiny to address the how and why for the future of justice via a more comprehensive, well-rounded understanding of everything that ‘never again’ really means and to that extent, it has succeeded in its findings.
Justice slow
Informal sites of justice, encompassing models such as the Gaza Tribunal, are part of the ‘slow justice’ model. The slow/fast formulation is Kahneman’s way to address what modes of thought are being applied. The framing choices of these informal sites of justice are anchored in a long history of people’s tribunals and they are not ready-made or given — therefore the ‘slow’ aspect. They do not have a main procedure to follow or a State-centric bureaucracy, they rather operate as an infrequent, calculating, and conscious response constructed by and for individuals, peoples and social movement organisations.
This form of informal sites of spaces that have evolved outside of States’ blessings have developed across different times and places. The Gaza Tribunal follows from a long history of at least 80 people’s tribunals that have emerged since 1966. As a founding member of the first Russell Tribunal on Vietnam (or People’s Tribunal for Vietnam), Bertrand Russell’s opening remarks evoked the idea that a people’s tribunal is meant to forge ‘mass resistance’. A fellow member of the same Russell Tribunal, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, further explained that the tribunal does two jobs at the same time: it works for the people of the perpetrator society to show them the framework and instrument to ask more questions; and at the same time, it works on the people because its findings galvanise them to act and resist. In his later exchange with then French President Charles De Gaulle, Sartre was contradicted by De Gaulle who was not very supportive of any sort of justice that does not “in principle as in execution, emanate from the State”.
The question of whether or not the Gaza Tribunal has legitimacy leads to many challenges that the Tribunal is purposefully not concerned with. People’s tribunals derive their legitimacy from the people, as the name suggests. The concept of ‘the people’, however, could mean different groups: the representative voices of the subaltern and their local support groups, as well as activists working in solidarity with the victims, and activist lawyers pushing for a different law. The Gaza Tribunalexists in the tradition of popular tribunals where those like The World Tribunal on Iraq had to elaborate on the source of legitimacy of the ‘people’ at length. In the landmark Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples signed in Algiers in 1976, the concept of ‘the people’ crystalizes, as the first article states that ‘every people has the right to exist’. The Algiers Charter went on to become the basis for the Permanent People’s Tribunal in Rome. People’s tribunals speak ‘the language of the law’ by and for the people, whether that is through the legal analysis and verdict they deliver, or by the legal experts that form their committees and performances. In that respect, the Gaza Tribunal claims to ‘derive its power and authority not from governments but from people in general and Palestinians in particular’.
Moving beyond a singular focus on State-led initiatives based on the UN Charter and prerogatives of international relations, the Gaza Tribunal presents itself and welcomes other sources of law and ethics, and acts as a space for alternative accountability and activism. The Tribunal makes use of the findings of UN experts and other organisations as sources of defining crimes which goes beyond the use of the classic sources of international law that the ICJ refers to (i.e. Article 38 of the UN Charter). For example, in the October 2024 Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, on ‘genocide as colonial erasure’ there is likewise a focus on the need to enlarge the scope that seems to be limiting the ICJ’s work. In that report to the Human Rights Council, Francesca Albanese found a totality of crimes committed altogether, which when exacted together form a ‘pattern of conduct indicative of genocidal concern.’ She additionally focuses in her analysis on the infrastructure of settler colonialism that supports such actions on the part of the State of Israel because these actions are not taking place in a vacuum. In line with these findings, the Gaza Tribunal uses its platform to go beyond just proving the genocidal intent towards analysing the underpinning infrastructure of settler colonialism (and apartheid). Using the language of international law to create an expansive momentum built on awareness and Palestinian narrative, the language of the law may still be redeemed as the ‘weapon of the oppressed,’ and not only a weapon of the oppressor. That makes the Tribunal a much-needed space for ‘incorporating testimonies from witnesses and statements from Palestinian civilians and organizations affected by the crisis’ and archiving them, according to its President Richard Falk.
In his opening session of the final Gaza Tribunal session, Falk reaffirmed the aim of the Tribunal to abandon neutrality and to be ‘openly partisan’ while at the same time encouraging ‘the judicial professionalism of the ICJ and ICC that provides a firm grounding of international law for the work of a Gaza Tribunal and its pronouncements’. All while adopting legal language, the Tribunal’s involvement of historians and literary scholars, social scientists and environmental scientists, journalists and poets shifts the subjects and subjectivities of those who can speak ‘the language of the law’ as a mode of resistance. In the Tribunal’s History, Ethics, and Philosophy Chamber, Jewish historian Avi Shlaim focused in his speech on the root causes of the genocide, featuring the history of Zionist settler colonialism on the one hand and western imperialism on the other.
From a more critical perspective on people’s tribunals, Tor Krever in his work on the ‘juridification of resistance’ points to how people’s tribunals feel the need to adopt ‘the form of a legal tribunal’ although ‘they do not seek to emulate formal courts of law’. The juridification of resistance is characterised by the translation of contested social and structural grievances into the vernacular of law, thereby framing claims legally, marshalling accountability and contesting power while remaining outside the courtroom proper. There are pitfalls to this juridification of resistance when thinking about broader political movements and activism, but there can also be space for people’s tribunals to bridge the gap between narrow legalistic institutional contexts and wider social struggles.
Unconditionally aware in the Palestinian context of the ‘complete failure of international law to prevent or halt a genocide, [we] as civil society have only the power of our voices and the ability to name the criminals, create a record of the crimes, and provide the evidence for accountability in the future’ declared Susan Akram of the International Law Chamber at the final session of the Gaza Tribunal. The idea here is that the practice of resistance takes place thanks to a process of documenting and publicising of violent policies and practices, to mobilise opposition to systemic injustice. In UN-mandated Commissions of Inquiry too, the evidence is systematically gathered for prosecutions, but State cooperation may restrict access. Recently, the tech giant Youtube has deleted 700 videos uploaded by Palestinian human rights groups documenting evidence of alleged Israeli government violations of international law in both Gaza and the West Bank. The Gaza Tribunal is therefore also essential, as per Akram’s declaration, in providing the record and evidence for accountability.
In terms of procedure, the Gaza Tribunal starts from the premise that a genocide is taking place, thereby precluding the assumption of innocence usually accorded at the Hague courts. Since there is no legal application of genocide for the Gaza Tribunal to prove as such (the political definition of genocide is already the starting point), then the Tribunal seems to be pursuing another goal altogether, that of winning what Falk has called the ‘legitimacy war’ in media and public debate. The urgency hails from the need to reverse the media mainstream narrative that reaffirms Western support for Israel’s genocide. While genocide as a crime has a high evidentiary threshold and requires a determination by a competent decision-maker, the Gaza Tribunal is concurrent with the crimes it already names and denounces. This sets the Tribunal on an exponential timeline to reverse the pervading institutional silences over the genocide. In his work on strategy and tactics, Robert Knox engages with the politics of temporalities, as in short-term tactical interventions directed towards strategic goals for the long-term. Knox explains that critical legal scholarship often claims to be pursuing strategic interventions but in fact is functioning in terms of more short-term debates while overlooking long-term strategic and structural questions. Here, the Gaza Tribunal can be seen as a tactical intervention that is not limited to a narrow and pragmatic legal analysis on its own terms, but is rather seeking to contribute to both a deeper historical and contextual understanding of the situation as well as to a longer-term political and ethical goal of justice and liberation.
The Gaza Tribunal does not want to become a second ICC, nor does it espouse the professional technical style and performance of formal legal spaces like the ICJ or the ICC. One could still observe however, some remnants of the ‘legal mimicking’ by way of the legal language used along the process usually conducted or supported by legal personnel. The Gaza Tribunal, and people’s tribunals in general, welcome a wide array of multinational legal and non-legal personnel that provide evidence. Evidence and arguments can be presented by lawyers and academics, along with welcoming representatives of legal institutions in Gaza and volunteering doctors. Notwithstanding, people’s tribunals should still be subject to criticism. They are typically composed of juries with well-known convictions, as is the case with the Gaza Tribunal. They are also often dominated by members from the Global North acting at the request of peoples located in the Global South.
Another point of criticism is the use of international law itself. Critical legal thinkers and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholars are particularly trained in recognising the structural biases and colonial and imperial bases of international law. It may seem therefore counter-intuitive for them to use international legal language given its inherent power inequality and colonial history to challenge injustice. In the words of Audre Lorde from 1979, it would seem to be counterintuitive to use international criminal law in pursuit of justice, for instance, because ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’. Nevertheless, TWAIL scholars and practitioners, as well as people’s tribunals personnel have to grapple with how much of a critique of international law is applicable in the current power framework and ultimately ‘how far they should adhere to existing or reimagined law to achieve their aims’.
‘Slow justice’ also involves the activation of a third wordlist approach to international law. The ICJ submissions of the South Africa against Israel are some of the most potent examples of solidarity among third world peoples, in addition to the connected case submitted by Nicaragua against Germany for its alleged complicity in Israeli genocide and war crimes. At the same time, the popular mobilisations in diaspora communities and demonstrations in main squares, train stations, and campuses around the world on a weekly basis show that, at different levels, the globe is watching the Third World align together in solidarity. The Gaza Tribunal attempts to bridge the Third World/Global South involvement by the make-up of its jury, which includes Sami Al-Arian, Christine Chinkin, Ghada Karmi, Kenize Mourad, Chandra Muzaffar and Biljana Vankovska.
The Gaza Tribunal remains therefore at the interface of international relations and global civil society with the means to translate global activism into legal work through the direct testimonies of survivors and representation of the victims, in an accessible manner to the public. This offers some level of antidote to what Nancy Fraser warns of as the dangers of ‘political voicelessness’ or representation-related injustices particularly in an increasingly globalised world. To that extent, social justice in a globalised world of Third World alignment, university campus contestations and international court processes requires representation-related injustices to be given ‘a political voice’, which is what the Gaza Tribunal seeks to do.
Conclusion
Gaza has been dubbed the moral challenge of the 21st century as it has laid bare all the structural issues purposefully designed into the justice mechanisms post-World War II. The need for the ‘slow justice’ of the Gaza Tribunal amidst the functioning of an inadequate ‘fast justice’ network of formal international legal institutions is indicative of the shortfall of existing modes and languages of accountability. While some may find that the available formal mechanisms of justice are irreversibly flawed and can only produce impunity, others still hope that complementary mechanisms of justice such as people’s tribunals can effectively put international law itself on trial. ‘Slow justice’ seems to accomplish its goals in both a more urgent and holistic fashion, while covering bigger jurisdictions and representing more people. If the international legal system is itself complicit in propagating impunity through its limitations, Gaza could very well be the graveyard of international law. And, if people’s tribunals are concerned with humanity and creating mass resistance for future crimes, then there can be scope for transitional justice interventions to lead to longer term positive impacts.
For the purposes of a critical study of paradigms of justice, it is crucial to observe both types of formal and informal spaces of justice as they judge the same defendant. Doing so in relation to Gaza in the current moment can provide us with pedagogical insights on the pitfalls of one form of justice that can be at least partially overcome by the other. In this context, legal advocates and critics alike are faced with competing images of justice that compel us to reflect on what we think justice ultimately is.
Jessica Elias is a PhD Candidate at Kent Law School researching informal spaces of justice. She was formerly a legal researcher at the Hague international courts.