Respectively, Howard M. Holtzmann Professor of Law, Yale Law School; Ph.D., J.D. Candidate, 2027, Cambridge University, Yale Law School; Professor of Practice, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University.
Introduction
International law has been an enduring reference point for Palestine, as well as an enduring source of frustration. In applying doctrine to Palestine, international lawyers and legal institutions have reckoned with the “gaps, conflicts and ambiguities” inherent in the law.4 Unexpected historical conjunctures have provided opportunities for legal actors to advance key arguments and secure some victories. However, these legal efforts also underscore the structural bias baked into international law and its institutions. Legal victories do little to shape facts on the ground. Palestine reminds us that international law continues to reproduce dominant power relations. Palestinian legal scholar Nimer Sultany frames Palestine as the “litmus test” for international law’s ability to address historical wrongs.5 The ever-worsening plight of Palestinians reflects the degree to which the international system has failed this test.
Critical traditions offer analytic lenses that explain the limitations and failures of international law with regard to Palestine while providing the means to imagine alternative jurisprudential paradigms.6 These approaches share basic analytical premises. First, colonialism and slavery fundamentally shaped international law’s norms and structures. Their afterlives persist in contemporary global governance, as international law continues to forge new exploitative, hierarchical, and inequitable orders. Today, the Security Council’s permanent member veto system perpetuates this function by ensuring that former colonial powers retain disproportionate control over international legal decisions, a structural arrangement that can legitimize and enable impunity for genocide. Second, international law has emerged from 500 years of racial capitalism and serves as its legitimating language. For instance, fifteenth-century Catholic doctrine granted Portugal rights of conquest and enslavement. In the sixteenth century, jurists like Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria and Dutch scholar Hugo Grotius formalized these claims into the “doctrine of discovery,” which provided legal justification for European expansion.7 Third, imperialism infuses both the structure and epistemology of international law. In other words, bias shapes not only the foundations and distributive effects of the law but also the production and consolidation of legal knowledge.
International law has remained a durable reference point because it provides institutional settings and opportunities grounded in some of the normative victories of the twentieth century, including the creation of doctrinal human rights frameworks and the right of self-determination.8 Consequently, the pursuit of alternative jurisprudential paradigms is both an innovative strategy to expand the existing international law toolbox and an imaginative enterprise to produce novel applications to advance emancipatory ends.
Critical scholars and practitioners interested in developing such alternatives have pursued three approaches. First, they seek sources of international law beyond the received canon, drawing from and building on plural traditions marginalized by history. Second, they interrogate and reinterpret the existing canon through Global South experiences and analysis in the Third World approaches to International Law (TWAIL) tradition. Finally, they innovate new doctrinal frameworks that might better address contemporary challenges.
In what follows, we use the Gaza Tribunal as a case study to provide an overview of these three approaches and consider how they contribute to an alternative jurisprudential paradigm. Established in 2024, the Gaza Tribunal is an independent civil society initiative to address the ongoing genocide in Gaza by serving as a “court of humanity and conscience.” Through a multi-chamber structure, the Tribunal integrates international law, geopolitical analysis, and historical-ethical inquiry. It embodies all three approaches we outline: drawing on plural legal traditions, reinterpreting existing doctrine through a decolonial lens, and innovating institutional forms beyond traditional courts. Moreover, it emerges at a moment when critical scholars have gained influence within formal institutions like the International Court of Justice (ICJ), yet those institutions remain constrained by political interference and procedural delays. Having concluded its proceedings in October 2025 with a final verdict condemning the genocide in Gaza, the Tribunal illustrates how alternative forums complement rather than replace formal international law.
I. Alternative Jurisprudential Paradigm
a. Plural Traditions of International Law
Legal actors from the Global South have long articulated visions of international law that offer alternatives to Western legal traditions. As newly independent states sought to steer the future of the global order in new directions in the historic decolonization era, the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia provided a venue to raise an alternative notion of sovereignty and international relations. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, and Sukarno, the first President of Indonesia, promoted alternative philosophical frameworks—Pancasila and Panchsheel—that offered distinct counterpoints to Westphalian sovereignty by embracing pluralism rather than the top-down and homogenizing conception of identity associated with the European nation-state.9 Pancasila, Indonesia’s foundational state philosophy enshrined in its 1945 Constitution, comprises five principles that serve as the basis for a national identity for a community defined by ethnic and sectarian differences: belief in God, just and civilized humanity, Indonesian unity, democracy guided by wisdom, and social justice for all people.
Similarly, Panchsheel’s Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence—mutual respect for sovereignty, nonaggression, noninterference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence—establish a framework that prioritizes solidarity over competition. While Westphalian sovereignty emerged from European wars and emphasizes absolute territorial control, both Pancasila and Panchsheel reflect anti-colonial cooperation. Though broadly framed and inconsistently applied, these principles guided the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a forum of states not formally aligned with major power blocs.10 The NAM provided frameworks for international relations and conflict resolution beyond the Westphalian model.
First Nations communities in North America offer an alternative to state-centered approaches to international law grounded in Indigenous epistemologies.11 Where conventional international law treats states as primary actors and focuses on sovereignty and borders, indigenous Fourth World or Original Nations Approaches center environmental stewardship, citizenship, and hospitality. Amar Bhatia’s groundbreaking study of Levi General (Deskáheh), a Haudenosaunee chief who addressed the League of Nations in 1923, illustrates this epistemological shift. Deskáheh rejected the Western legal framework that divides authority into discrete categories—public versus private, national versus international, domestic versus foreign—arguing that these distinctions were artificial impositions on Indigenous governance systems.12 This conceptual rethinking lays the groundwork for alternative epistemic framings that do not assume the primacy of the state. Indeed, Indigenous treaty-making practices, both formal and informal, embody these different assumptions. As Beverly Jacobs explains:
What we call international law is the recognition of separate but equal nations that include Seneca, Cayuga Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk and later the Tuscarora Nations. The Peacemaker through the messages of the Great Law of Peace brought these different nations together, which is our international law.13
Indigenous international law also involved treaties with settlers. James Sákéj Youngblood Henderson and Marie Battiste argue that Indigenous treaty-making was rooted in ecological relationships and spiritual teachings rather than abstract legal frameworks.14 For example, ceremonial protocols required treaty-makers to understand the sacred relationship between humans and land before negotiations could begin.15 Where Western law separates spiritual, ecological, and legal authority into distinct spheres, Indigenous law integrates them as inseparable dimensions of governance.
Where Western international law privileges written documents and formal procedures, Indigenous law encompasses ceremonial performance and embodied practice relevant to international law. Henderson describes the meetings of the international working group of Indigenous people as an “international ceremony for Indigenous peoples” generating “new rituals” that draw on a decolonial and transnational Indigenous peoples’ history of ecological practice regarding “good order and human rights.”16 This is not merely symbolic. They are enacting lawmaking through ceremony, connecting contemporary human rights struggles to Indigenous practices of maintaining good order through reciprocal relationships with land and community.
The binary invoked in the preceding paragraphs may risk overstating the fixity of different legal systems and understate the “gaps, conflicts and ambiguities” that inhabit these legal systems. However, there is heuristic value in marking different orientations without essentializing these differences; it might help us acknowledge disciplinary and professional blinders, challenge the settled authority of ‘western’ models, and complicate our understanding of legality as such by pluralizing our understanding of possible legal repertoires.
The systematic erasure of non-Western legal traditions that Indigenous scholars contest also motivated pioneering work in Asia and Africa. Indian international law scholar R.P. Anand was a trailblazer in recovering non-Western traditions of international law. As a first-generation TWAIL scholar, Anand challenged the Eurocentric narrative of international law by documenting pre-existing Asian and African traditions of interstate relations, diplomatic practices, and legal principles that the West had systematically erased from the canonical history of international law. His work demonstrated that these regions had their own sophisticated systems of international law long before European colonization. A generation of scholars built on Anand’s work excavating marginalized traditions, including legal scholars Umut Özsu on Ottoman international law and Arnulf Becker Lorca on Latin American international law. This scholarship calls into question the Western monopoly on legal knowledge and makes space for genuinely plural legal futures.
b. Decolonizing the Canon
While the previous approach draws on non-Western traditions to pluralize international law, a second critical strand of literature revisits received Western doctrine through the historical perspective of the Global South. This decolonial scholarship reassesses international law doctrines and interpretive traditions, paying particular attention to the colonial legacies embedded within dominant frameworks. It excavates and reimagines existing legal structures from below. Such critical engagement yields distinct jurisprudential directions to construct alternative paradigms.
1. Sources: Expanding Customary International Law
Scholars such as Bhupinder Chimni have argued that the beneficiaries of the international system have shaped customary international law (CIL) to advantage the most powerful actors.17 Chimni draws attention to the fact that the sources of CIL rely on state practice. However, given that most states in the Global South gained independence relatively recently, the archive of postcolonial state practice is relatively thinner and more marginalized. Thus, any discussion of generality or representativeness in CIL practice by default becomes a reference to Western state practice and entrenches a bias augmenting Western state practice.18 To counter this bias, scholars propose developing alternative repertoires of custom that democratize and pluralize the sources of CIL.
What might such alternative sources look like in practice? The July 2024 ICJ Advisory Opinion declared Israel’s occupation of Palestine unlawful under international law, finding that Israel’s continued presence in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza violates prohibitions on the acquisition of territory by force and the right of Palestinian self-determination. While welcome, this conclusion was already immanent in several sources of CIL that courts and international bodies had failed to properly recognize before this decision.
Consider the principles and practices underlying the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Transnational and local social movements have mobilized BDS-based campaigns in support of Palestinian liberation and condemnation of Israeli occupation. The BDS movement has catalyzed unprecedented global support from diverse states and local governments. The range of measures spans from municipal actions—such as Derry in Northern Ireland and Barcelona adopting ethical procurement policies that sever ties with companies complicit in Israeli violations—to state-level limitations on engagement with Israel, including Bolivia suspending diplomatic relations, Colombia banning arms purchases and coal exports, and Turkey suspending all trade. The Canadian Parliament also voted to end arms exports to Israel. Malaysia banned Israeli-owned ships, while Norway’s sovereign wealth fund divested nearly half a billion dollars in Israel Bonds. As of April 2024, over 100 U.S. city councils have passed ceasefire resolutions.
Moreover, multiple national and multilateral bodies have endorsed similar analyses, including the Human Rights Commission of the Chilean Senate, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and the African Union. Since 1974, UN General Assembly (UNGA) resolutions have consistently condemned the occupation and affirmed Palestinian self-determination.19 A decolonial approach to CIL would recognize these diverse expressions as legitimate sources of custom.
2. Standing: Solidarity as Legal Interest
While expanding CIL sources addresses what counts as international law, an equally important question is who can invoke it. Decolonial approaches answer this by reimagining legal standing through solidarity.20 The Draft Declaration on International Solidarity advances an interconnected approach to human rights, recognizing international cooperation and shared responsibility in creating a more just and sustainable world.
Solidarity has been particularly significant in the evolution of the struggle for self-determination within the human rights tradition. Hernán Santa-Cruz, the Chilean diplomat who co-drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), described “an atmosphere of genuine solidarity and brotherhood” as the foundation stone of human rights.21 The 1955 Bandung Conference reinforced this connection between solidarity and the right to self-determination when it endorsed the UDHR in its Final Communiqué, linking human rights to anti-colonial solidarity.22
This solidarity principle has found powerful expression in recent ICJ cases that fundamentally reframe legal standing. Traditionally, international law required states to have a direct legal interest or to be specially affected by violations to have standing.23 This doctrine often shields perpetrators when victims lack state representation or when powerful states block action. However, two recent genocide cases have challenged this limitation. Gambia’s submission regarding genocide against the Rohingya and South Africa’s submission regarding genocide in Gaza illustrate how the Court now recognizes standing grounded not in direct harm but in solidarity.24 Neither Gambia nor South Africa claimed direct injury from these violations. Instead, they argued that genocide anywhere constitutes a threat to the international legal order they have a sovereign interest in protecting. These states effectively argued that threats to distant communities fall within their own sovereign interests—that “solidarity” and “common interest” create legitimate extraterritorial legal interests sufficient to establish standing. The shift from standing based on individual state harm to standing based on collective responsibility is momentous.25 The recognition of these broader grounds for legal standing extends existing international legal acknowledgment of solidarity in self-determination struggles to create a new model of legal interest rooted in shared humanity rather than territorial proximity.26
Crucially, solidarity is not a neutral norm—it takes political and legal meaning from the context in which it is invoked and the distributional questions at stake. In the Gambian and South African cases, the context is genocide and the denial of self-determination, not abstract legal violations. This is why the Draft Declaration on the Right to International Solidarity situates solidarity as indivisible from self-determination, grounding it specifically in the challenge of preventing and removing the causes of asymmetries and inequities between and within States. Solidarity operates as a legal principle precisely when it challenges structural oppression and power imbalances.
c. Beyond Traditional International Institutions
The first two approaches—pluralizing legal traditions and decolonizing existing doctrine—challenge the structural and epistemic biases intrinsic to conventional international law. These critical interventions also serve as building blocks for innovation as sub-national and transnational actors produce novel institutional and normative models for international legitimacy and global justice. This Section contains a survey of creative alternative structures that actors and communities have developed to seek justice beyond traditional international institutions.
1. Truth Commissions
Truth commissions are among the most significant institutional innovations to emerge from the Global South. They prioritize testimony and historical clarification over punishment. Argentina’s 1983 National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) is often seen as the first official truth commission, establishing a new model of transitional justice. The resulting report Nunca Mas (“Never Again”) became a best-seller that exemplified how truth-seeking processes could complement and contribute to justice processes. Subsequently, South Africa’s truth-for-amnesty model envisioned prosecutions and truth commissions as complementary mechanisms—carrots and sticks working in tandem to advance justice. While the commission arguably substituted for prosecutions in practice, this vision sparked widespread institutional experimentation in the early 1990s.27 That decade saw the establishment of two international tribunals and over half a dozen truth commissions, most of which generated reparations programs for victims of human rights abuses.
While impacts varied, many invested in truth commissions’ potential to address victims’ priorities in challenging political contexts.28 At their best, these transitional justice institutions clarified individual cases while revealing the broader architecture of abuse. In cases where criminal tribunals followed truth commissions, the documentation work of the commissions helped build cases against those with command responsibility. In Chile and Guatemala, where immediate prosecutions proved politically impossible, truth commissions established historical records to enable prosecutions decades later. Many commissions also produced reparations programs that, while inadequate, provided some recognition to victim families.
Orthodox legal procedures, such as adversarial argumentation, forensic fact-finding, and rigid courtroom protocols, can alienate and retraumatize victims.29 These failures of traditional legal procedures led many to embrace truth commissions’ victim-centered, restorative justice philosophy as more promising for marginalized voices.30 Truth commissions operate on the premise that those who suffered human rights violations are best qualified to speak to the scope and intensity of the violations they endured.31 Some sessions enabled victims to confront perpetrators directly. Others allowed survivors to challenge public officials who have failed to prevent those violations or had facilitated a structure of impunity. These public testimonies created accountability in a more democratic register than courtrooms allowed, foregrounding what commissions called “dialogical truth”—an understanding emerging between testifiers and citizens. Truth commissions thus sought to facilitate reckoning with the past by connecting individual testimonies to national histories and counter-histories. With broader mandates than criminal indictments, they were better positioned to examine specific acts of impunity and the structures that produced and sustained them.
Yet the promise of truth commissions to deliver both healing and justice often collided with political realities.32 Criticisms of truth commissions increased by the turn of the century.33 Truth commissions’ incorporation into a globalized transitional justice industry curbed their potential for engagement with national and international structures enabling human rights violations, and they became more legalistic and individualized.34 Their potential for transformative justice was blunted as political issues with far-reaching distributive consequences were translated into matters of apolitical technical expertise.35 Moreover, the detailed historical records truth commissions produced, while important, highlighted impunity when commissions could not punish powerful perpetrators.36 Reparations programs fell short, and systemic injustices remained untouched. For example, South Africa’s commission did not address the vast land dispossession of Black South Africans, leaving the wealth acquired during the apartheid regime concentrated in the hands of the White community.37 Critics claimed that truth commissions could distract from and even legitimize political inaction on reparations or prosecutions.38 Despite their real contributions—countering denialism, preserving evidence for future prosecutions, and amplifying victims’ voices—even truth commissions’ advocates acknowledged serious structural limitations.
2. Civil Society Tribunals
Civil society tribunals, also known as people’s tribunals, represent another innovation operating outside formal legal systems while drawing on principles of international law.39 These community-based initiatives often convene in response to the failure of formal institutions to act. They assemble diverse panels of private citizens to hear testimonies, examine evidence, and issue judgments.40 Though they lack official legal authority, they document violations, mobilize communities, and generate political pressure for accountability.41 As Jacques Derrida observed, their goal “is not to reach a verdict resulting in sanctions but to raise or to sharpen the vigilance of the citizens of the world.”42 These tribunals model people-centered justice often as a rebuke to formal legal institutions’ inaction or inability to hold the powerful to account.
This innovative form of justice has roots in a historical moment of both frustration and necessity. The foundational model emerged in 1967 with the Russell Tribunal on Vietnam, which philosophers Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre established to investigate U.S. war crimes during the Vietnam War.43 Existing international institutions had reached a breaking point: while Nuremberg had established precedents for international accountability, Cold War politics had paralyzed the UN Security Council and rendered the ICJ ineffective for addressing superpower conflicts. Russell and Sartre responded by creating an independent accountability mechanism that could operate beyond state consent and geopolitical vetoes.44
The Russell Tribunal’s legacy lies not only in its specific findings about Vietnam, but also in demonstrating that accountability mechanisms could be democratized and decentralized.45 It transformed marginalized communities from petitioners waiting at institutional gates into powerful voices that claimed their seats at the table and commanded global attention. This transformation from silence to voice has resulted in courtrooms without states and justice without geopolitical permission. Capturing the essence of this new form of justice, Sartre stated during the Inaugural Statement to the Tribunal: “we are powerless: it is the guarantee of our independence. . .representing no government and no party, nobody can give us orders: we will examine the facts ‘in our hearts and conscience’ one might say or, if you prefer, openly and independently.”46
This powerlessness-as-power would define people’s tribunals for decades to come. The second Russell Tribunal (1974-1976), held in Rome and Brussels, put Latin American dictatorships and their systematic human rights violations in the international spotlight.47 Building on this momentum, the Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT) was established in 1979 to institutionalize the Russell Tribunal model into a permanent body devoted to listening to people confronting impunity and to amplifying voices excluded from intergovernmental institutions like the International Criminal Court. The PPT has since held more than fifty sessions across multiple continents.48
Other civil society tribunals adopted this model. For instance, the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women (1976) gave a platform to survivors of domestic violence, rape, and gender-based persecution from across the globe, creating space for testimonies that formal courts routinely dismissed. The World Tribunal on Iraq (2003-2005) mobilized Iraqi civilians, international peace activists, and legal scholars across multiple sessions in different countries, bypassing the UN Security Council’s paralysis over the invasion. The Iran Tribunal (2007-2013) emerged from Iranian mothers responding to mass state killings of their children. Creating a grassroots tribunal directly accountable to those affected, it addressed crimes against humanity where the International Criminal Court lacked jurisdiction over Iran.49 The Russell Tribunal on Palestine (2009-2013) assembled international jurors to examine violations of international law affecting Palestinians, scrutinizing the responsibilities of Israel, the United States, European Union member states, and international organizations in perpetuating the occupation and non-implementation of UN resolutions. The Monsanto Tribunal (2016) in The Hague enabled farmers, health experts, and environmental advocates from six continents to present evidence of corporate ecological crimes—testimonies that could never reach the ICJ due to its state-centric jurisdiction.
Despite their different contexts, these tribunals have developed methodological approaches distinct from those of formal courts. They prioritize the testimony of those directly impacted by violence and oppression, treating experiential knowledge as legally relevant. In a significant departure from conventional legal proceedings, these tribunals center affected communities, treating individual experiences as sources of legal knowledge rather than evidentiary inputs. Further, many of these tribunals incorporate historical context and structural analysis alongside legal questions, developing a holistic approach to evidence assessment that challenges the narrow frameworks of conventional legal analysis. These forums democratize legal knowledge by making international law accessible to the general public through open and clear explanations, participatory processes, and multimedia documentation. These innovations directly address the elitism and abstraction that often characterize formal international legal institutions.
However, not all people’s tribunals approach international law the same way. While the Russell Tribunal on Vietnam used the law strategically to challenge existing frameworks, some more recent tribunals have tended toward what might be characterized as “mimicry without mockery,” largely replicating established legal structures rather than interrogating their boundaries. This suggests a potential underutilization of the tribunal format’s relative freedom from institutional constraints to examine the scope and underlying assumptions of international law itself.
What distinguishes the Russell Tribunal on Vietnam from other people’s tribunals are the ways in which it wielded international law as a tool rather than treating it as a raison d’être. Sartre and Russell’s original tribunal demonstrated what legal scholar Robert Knox termed “principled opportunism,” using international law strategically without fetishizing it.50 Sartre explicitly acknowledged that while Vietnamese anti-imperialists needed no legal validation to oppose U.S. aggression, deploying legal frameworks could “open the eyes” of the “petit bourgeois masses” not aligned with anti-imperial movements. Law served as a mobilization tool rather than an end in itself. Crucially, Sartre maintained that imperialism “is beyond the reach of any legal or moral condemnation.”51 Determining that the United States violated international law, according to Sartre, would not affect the systemic logic of imperialism undergirding those violations.52
The 2009-2013 Russell Tribunal on Palestine, on the other hand, illustrates a different trajectory, one that Tor Krever describes as “the juridification of resistance,” in which international law shifts from a tactical tool toward an organizing principle. As Krever explains, operating within a weakened Third World movement and increasingly depoliticized international context, the Palestine tribunal generally emphasized “the supremacy of international law as the basis for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”53 The tribunal focused its recommendations on further international legal interventions such as ICC investigations, ICJ advisory opinions, and domestic court actions as primary responses to Palestinian suffering. This legalistic orientation, Krever suggests, may risk “obscuring or even foreclosing a deeper inquiry into the conditions and political-economic forces” behind unlawful acts, potentially reducing Israeli apartheid to “a crime without cause or context.”54
These tensions between legalist and political approaches have persisted across tribunals, manifesting in concrete organizational discussions. As Ayça Çubukçu documents in the context of the tribunal on Iraq, organizers split between those insisting that legitimacy could only stem from law as “the sole mother tongue” of the tribunal, and activists who viewed it as fundamentally political.55 The Russell Tribunal on Palestine faced similar tensions, with coordinator Frank Barat recalling: “We had this tension at every session, at every meeting.”56 Organizers struggled to navigate the “fine line between the tribunal as spectacle and as legal proceeding,” with critics complaining it was “just a lawyers’ initiative” while others insisted it must be “an activist initiative.”57 This fundamental tension between law and politics remains irresolvable, forcing each tribunal to make concrete institutional choices about whether to prioritize procedural formalism or political mobilization. Such decisions have profound implications for both their legitimacy claims and their capacity to generate meaningful transformation.
These differences matter because they reflect competing visions of law’s role in social transformation. The most effective tribunals recognize that legal violations often reflect deeper systemic issues that law alone cannot address, including the very conditions of imperialism and settler colonialism that define the international order. By situating violations within comprehensive patterns of domination, they resist what Hilary Charlesworth calls international law’s tendency to fragment systemic oppression into “bite-size pieces” that obscure larger contexts.58 Less effective tribunals risk reproducing the very constraints they were designed to overcome, positioning law as the exclusive horizon of political possibility rather than one tool within broader struggles for justice.
II. The Gaza Tribunal
The Gaza Tribunal offers a recent example of how civil society tribunals can embody the alternative jurisprudential approaches outlined in this article. It emerges at a unique historical moment when, for the first time, critical legal perspectives have gained meaningful presence within formal international institutions. The South African legal team’s genocide case presentation at the ICJ in January 2024—among the most widely viewed international legal events in history—successfully anchored the Genocide Convention as the dominant framework in global consciousness regarding Gaza. Nevertheless, even as the power of the South Africa case demonstrated the potential of critical approaches within traditional forums, the ongoing genocide reveals the persistent limitations of institutions vulnerable to political pressure and procedural constraints. In embodying alternative jurisprudential paradigms, the Gaza Tribunal both complements and critiques formal institutions. The Gaza Tribunal demonstrates how international law can be reconstructed from below to serve justice through its multi-chamber structure integrating legal, geopolitical, and historical-ethical perspectives; recognition of grassroots movements as legitimate sources of customary law; commitment to accessible and non-technical legal analysis over narrow juridical formalism; and its innovative institutional design transcending formal court constraints.
Established in London in November 2024 and led by Richard Falk, former UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, the Gaza Tribunal is a civil society initiative investigating Israel’s conduct in Gaza from October 7, 2023, onward, with particular focus on allegations of genocide, war crimes, and the complicity of third-party states providing military and diplomatic support. Unlike formal courts, the Tribunal operates with flexibility regarding both timeline and scope. It held preliminary sessions in Sarajevo in May 2024, convened hearings in London in September 2025, and delivered its final findings in Istanbul on October 26, 2025, documenting ongoing atrocities in real-time rather than adjudicating historical crimes years after the fact. The Tribunal’s proceedings allowed participation from survivors, witnesses, civil society organizations, academics, journalists, experts, and medical professionals who have worked in Gaza—voices often restricted in formal legal proceedings. While the Tribunal investigated state actors (primarily Israel and its enablers), it did not determine individual criminal liability; rather, as a people’s tribunal, its Jury of Conscience convened to issue moral judgments grounded in what its final statement describes as “the unyielding belief that every human life has equal worth, and that no state or ideology has the right to destroy an entire people.”59 Multiple media platforms have disseminated the Tribunal’s findings and compiled them into a comprehensive multimedia archive accessible to lawyers, researchers, policymakers, and activists pursuing accountability through various channels.
The foundation of the Gaza Tribunal’s alternative paradigm is its three-chamber structure, which moves beyond Western-centric legal frameworks by refusing to treat law as autonomous from politics, history, and ethics. The International Law Chamber applies “overlapping international legal frameworks” including the Genocide Convention, Geneva Conventions, and apartheid. Importantly, Chamber One explicitly rejects mimicking “the professional juridical style of the ICJ, which features elaborate technical analyses of main legal issues, strictly defined,” instead prioritizing “legally accurate and hopefully illuminating but non-technical and readable presentations of international law for the sake of media and public relevance.”60 Working alongside it are the International Relations and World Order Chamber, which exposes how political realism subordinates law to geopolitical priorities, and the History, Ethics and Philosophy Chamber, which clarifies how historical narratives and ethical concepts are weaponized to shield genocide from critique. This integrated approach challenges the fragmentation typical of formal international courts by situating legal violations within their geopolitical and historical contexts.
This contextualization manifests most clearly in the Tribunal’s refusal of ahistorical neutrality: rather than treating genocide as an aberration requiring only legal remedy, it situates violence within systems of power. The Tribunal’s final statement articulates this transformative vision explicitly. It affirms the genocide as occurring “within—and enabled by—a broader settler-colonial apartheid regime rooted in the supremacist ideology of Zionism,” tracing “root causes” to “a racist, supremacist ideology” that underpins “a system aiming to dispossess, dominate, and erase Palestinians, supported by an oppressive neo-colonial power structure led by the United States and its allies.”61 As Jessica Elias observes, the Tribunal’s multi-chamber structure enables it to address the essential questions of “how” and “why” that narrow legal procedures systematically exclude. By integrating historical, political, and philosophical analysis alongside legal frameworks, the Tribunal exemplifies what Elias terms “slow justice”: a deliberate, people-centered process that paradoxically delivers findings more urgently than the “fast justice” of state-centric formal institutions, which despite their temporal slowness remain constrained by bureaucratic procedures, political interference, and structural biases toward powerful states.62
The Tribunal also fundamentally reimagines what counts as law and who can invoke it by expanding both the sources of CIL and the grounds for legal standing. The Tribunal’s evidentiary framework recognizes the decades-long BDS movement as legitimate practice generating legal norms. Where formal institutions often dismiss civil society resolutions and grassroots organizing as legally irrelevant, the Tribunal treats these as valid sources of customary law. This approach legitimizes Palestinian lived experiences under occupation as foundational legal knowledge, not mere testimony to be filtered through Western legal categories. The expanded conception of sources transforms the conceptualization of legal standing by grounding it in solidarity. By investigating the third-party complicity of states providing weapons and diplomatic support, the Tribunal extends the solidarity-based standing model beyond who can bring claims to who can be held accountable. The Tribunal’s October 2025 final statement explicitly condemns Western governments—”particularly the United States”—as complicit through their provision of “diplomatic cover, weapons, weapon parts, intelligence, military assistance and training, and continuing economic relations.”63 Just as South Africa and Gambia claimed standing through solidarity with victims of genocide, the Tribunal recognizes that states enabling genocide violate their obligations to the entire international community, not just to Palestinians directly harmed.
While the ICJ’s July 2024 Advisory Opinion recognized that all states have obligations not to assist Israel’s illegal occupation, the Tribunal goes a step further by applying the principle of collective accountability to the ongoing genocide, investigating how third-party complicity enables mass atrocities. Yet the Tribunal missed a critical opportunity in addressing broader complicity. While the Jury of Conscience’s final statement of findings and moral judgment documented Western governments’ complicity (particularly that of the United States) through detailed findings on weapons provision, diplomatic cover, and economic relations, it offers only vague references to broader “international complicity, including from many governments.”64 It did not issue comparable findings against non-Western states, despite their diplomatic, economic, or security relationships with Israel throughout the genocide. This selective application contradicts the Tribunal’s own declaration that “silence and inaction in the face of genocide are not an option and are other forms of complicity.”65
Extending beyond state actors, the Tribunal’s findings also identify non-state complicity: biased media reporting that conforms to elite interests, academic institutions that support Israel through investments while silencing pro-Palestinian voices, and global supply chains that sustain genocide through weapons, banking, technology, and transportation infrastructure. The Tribunal characterizes this as “the political economy of genocide,” representing “the highest form of hyper imperialism of the 21st century.”66
The Gaza Tribunal also reckons with the question that divided previous tribunals: how to maintain legal credibility without sacrificing political mobilization. For example, the Tribunal prioritizes “legitimacy and pedagogy” alongside legal analysis, ensuring findings are “drafted in a form accessible to the public” and disseminated through multiple media platforms. This commitment to democratizing legal knowledge challenges the elitism of many international proceedings. By operating with “full transparency” and “without the constraints of prevailing circles of international power,” the Tribunal models how international legal mechanisms might function if freed from geopolitical vetoes and procedural obstacles. In its final statement, the jury explicitly positions itself as speaking “with the authority of conscience” when “law is silenced by power,” asserting that “when states are silent civil society can and must speak out.”67 This formulation recognizes the Tribunal’s dual role: complementing formal legal institutions while providing what they cannot—a forum where “conscience must become the final tribunal.” While we have indicated instances where the Tribunal fails to achieve this broader mandate, particularly with respect to the complicity of non-Western states, it nonetheless represents an expression of moral and political conscience that lies beyond the scope of what formal international institutions offer.
The Tribunal’s framers acknowledge that formal courts’ work is “vital to the cause of law and justice,” though the exclusion of civil society voices, procedural delays, and vulnerability to political pressure limit the effectiveness of these institutions. Rather than rivaling formal legal institutions, the Gaza Tribunal seeks to address these challenges and limitations. The ICJ, despite ruling that genocide is plausibly occurring, cannot impose individual criminal accountability, a limitation inherent to its mandate. Meanwhile, the ICC faces unprecedented obstacles. The Prosecutor’s warrant requests against Israeli and Hamas officials remain stalled amid political pressure. The Prosecutor’s Office faces explicit threats from powerful states to use “all means necessary” to block proceedings against Israeli officials and to punish the ICC’s professional staff. The Tribunal’s final findings note this paradox:
There has been resort to international judicial bodies, the International Court of Justice by South Africa and the request for an Advisory Opinion by the UN General Assembly with respect to UNRWA and the arrest warrants issued by the ICC, yet these have been ignored with impunity by Israel and other states have made little real protest and minimal sanctions have been imposed. Indeed, it is the ICC personnel and NGOs assisting the Court that have been sanctioned by the United States.68
By contrast, the Gaza Tribunal marshals the power of the powerless, sidestepping these geopolitical constraints to a significant extent. This is best exemplified by the Tribunal’s treatment of genocide as a comprehensive assault on Palestinian life and futurity by examining systemic harms, including ecocide, induced famine, and the destruction of educational infrastructure. The Tribunal’s October 2025 findings introduce an expanded vocabulary of destruction: domicide (the destruction of homes as repositories of memory and aspiration), ecocide (warfare through environmental ruination that destroys the capacity to survive), scholasticide (genocide of knowledge through destruction of educational infrastructure and killing of students and teachers), reprocide (systematic targeting of reproductive care), politicide (assassination of political and cultural leaders), and the deliberate weaponization of starvation and denial of medical care.69 By naming these distinct but interconnected crimes, the Tribunal reveals what it describes as “a coherent and consistent pattern of exterminatory violence” that formal institutions, constrained by narrow legal categories, struggle to capture holistically.
Crucially, the Tribunal’s comprehensive documentation translates legal findings into tools for political action. By creating a multimedia archive accessible to “lawyers, academic researchers, policy makers, and media workers,” it equips diverse actors to pursue accountability through multiple channels. Recognizing that meaningful change requires organized political pressure, the Tribunal explicitly aims to support “solidarity initiatives, most notably BDS, but also religiously motivated groups, organized labor, [and] advocates of compliance with international law.” This bridging role reflects a sophisticated understanding of how legal change occurs—not through law alone but through the interaction of normative frameworks and political mobilization. The final statement makes this explicit in its recommendations, calling for “comprehensive global confrontation” that mobilizes “peoples, movements, parties, unions, civil-society organizations, and individuals so that solidarity becomes power.”70 When governments refuse to implement international law and the UN is incapable of doing so, people’s tribunals demonstrate how civil society can generate pressure for enforcement through documentation, consciousness-raising, and coalition-building. Legal victories without political mobilization cannot shape facts on the ground.
In pursuing multiple functions simultaneously, the Gaza Tribunal embodies alternative jurisprudential paradigms not as utopian replacements for international law, but as practical demonstrations of its potential. By centering marginalized voices and integrating multiple knowledge systems, the Tribunal demonstrates what international law might look like if rebuilt on solidarity rather than sovereignty, on interdisciplinary holism rather than narrow legalism, and on structural contextualization rather than Western formalism.
As critical legal scholars gain unprecedented influence within the ICC and ICJ, alternative forums like the Gaza Tribunal preserve transformative visions that might otherwise be compromised through institutional constraints. As in Chile and Guatemala, where documentation enabled prosecutions when political conditions shifted, these forums serve as both immediate and long-term repositories of evidence. The Tribunal’s archive represents what its Jury describes as “lasting evidence of the truth of the genocide against the Palestinian people,” created precisely because “genocide must be named and documented and that impunity feeds continuing violence throughout the globe.”
In these ways, the Gaza Tribunal contributes to the urgent work of addressing ongoing genocide and what its framers call “the future of international law itself.” Palestine remains the litmus test of whether international law can transform from a tool of domination into an instrument of liberation. This transformation requires simultaneous investment in reforming existing institutions, imagining alternatives, and building the political power to bridge normative frameworks and material change. The Tribunal’s concluding assertion— “Silence is not neutral; silence is complicity; neutrality is surrender to evil”—captures the ethical imperative driving civil society tribunals. In moments when formal institutions prove inadequate, alternative forums must mobilize conscience, document atrocity, and build solidarity to enable future accountability and structural transformation.
III. A Path Forward
Since October 2023, the Israeli military has killed more than 75,000 Palestinians in Gaza, and likely closer to twice that number when those buried under rubble and dying of injuries and starvation are accounted for.71 It has destroyed more than three-quarters of the residential infrastructure of Gaza, forcibly displaced the entire civilian population of Gaza multiple times, concentrating civilians in designated humanitarian zones and then bombing those same areas. Israel has attacked and destroyed every hospital and medical center in Gaza, killing hundreds of doctors, nurses, and emergency medical workers. It has targeted water desalination plants, sewage treatment facilities, electricity infrastructure, and the agricultural and manufacturing capacity of the economy. It has destroyed every university in the territory, decimating the entire higher education sector. In short, Israel is engaged in an ongoing process intended to inflict on the Palestinian people conditions of life calculated to destroy them in whole or in part. Israel is conducting a widespread and systematic attack directed against the Palestinian people of Gaza that constitutes crimes against humanity; engaging in grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions resulting in a well-documented record of mass war crimes; and committing genocide. All of this has occurred with real-time images, videos, diaries, journalistic and scholarly reports, eye-witness testimony from international humanitarian aid organizations and doctors, and detailed human rights reporting. The evidentiary record of Israeli atrocities is massive and definitive. On September 16, 2025, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, published a report concluding that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza since October 7, 2023. In October 2025, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese documented how this genocide is a collective crime, sustained by the complicity of influential Third States that have enabled longstanding systemic violations of international law by Israel through direct support, material aid, diplomatic protection, and, in some cases, active participation.
This genocide unfolds at a pivotal moment for international law. For the first time, critical legal scholars have gained unprecedented influence within formal institutions, as reflected in the South African legal team’s January 2024 genocide case presentation at the ICJ. But while developments in the formal institutions demonstrate that alternative visions are beginning to have transformative effects, existing institutional constraints constantly hinder such advances. Formal proceedings move at a glacial pace while Palestinians die daily. The ICJ’s final judgment may take years, and the ICC’s warrants cannot be enforced without state cooperation. Moreover, even these limited advances have provoked the fierce backlash described above, particularly in the form of sanctions the U.S. has imposed against the ICC and UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. The combination of procedural delays and political obstruction reveals the structural limitations of formal institutions: they can establish legal frameworks and shape global consciousness but cannot halt ongoing atrocities or alter facts on the ground without political enforcement. This is why alternative jurisprudential paradigms, such as those manifested in initiatives like the Gaza Tribunal, remain essential.
a. Three Independent Spheres
The essential question is how to pursue formal institutions and alternative paradigms simultaneously. This strategy requires coordinated action across three interdependent spheres, each reinforcing the others while addressing their respective limitations: formal institutions, alternative paradigms like the Gaza Tribunal, and the civil society movement.
Formal institutions like the ICJ and ICC provide influential normative frameworks, creating legal precedents and shifting global consciousness. These institutions possess the authority to establish binding legal standards, issue authoritative interpretations of international law, and generate decisions that carry legitimacy in diplomatic and political spheres. Their pronouncements shape how states, civil society organizations, and publics worldwide understand and discuss issues of international justice. Yet they remain constrained by procedural delays, political interference, and enforcement limitations that prevent them from stopping ongoing atrocities.
Alternative paradigms like the Gaza Tribunal center marginalized voices and preserve transformative visions that might be compromised by institutional constraints. These initiatives create spaces where those affected can testify, where evidence can be preserved without the gatekeeping functions that limit formal proceedings, and where jurisprudential innovations can be explored without institutional constraints. Alternative paradigms function as laboratories for imagining what international law might become if built on solidarity rather than state power. They serve as a regulatory ideal, a horizon toward which formal institutions might evolve. The initiatives document violations with higher standards of transparency than official courts and transform findings into tools for political mobilization. Yet they lack the enforcement mechanisms and diplomatic authority of formal institutions.
Civil society movements provide the crucial bridge, building political pressure from below to enforce legal norms. Faced with formal institutions that can declare genocide but not stop it, global movements have organized massive demonstrations, campus encampments, consumer boycotts, divestment campaigns, and even flotillas of humanitarian assistance. While civil society cannot assert legal standing before the ICJ or ICC, these movements provide the political pressure essential for translating normative victories into material change. Yet without legal frameworks to anchor their demands, movements risk fragmentation or co-optation.
b. Next Steps and Future Trajectories
The implementation of this strategy requires specific, coordinated actions in the immediate term while building toward systemic transformation. While formal institutions have troubling and structural shortcomings, there are nonetheless conjunctural reasons to form short-term strategic alliances with them on some issues. In such forums, advocates may press for accountability even as they highlight jurisdictional limitations and address enforcement gaps. This might mean, for example, supporting state cooperation with ICC warrants, building coalitions in the UN General Assembly to circumvent Security Council paralysis, and leveraging ICJ rulings to establish third-state obligations to prevent genocide and cease forms of complicity and collusion. Documenting the procedural obstacles and political interference that undermine these institutions makes visible the gap between their normative authority and practical limitations in ways that empower advocates to demand alternative forums and models of accountability.
Where advocates design such alternative spaces, as with the Gaza Tribunal, they must do so in a way that facilitates a multiplicity of transformative ends. Taking the Tribunal as a model, priorities included evidence preservation, centering Palestinian testimony, and developing jurisprudential innovations that both surpass and also influence formal institutions. These objectives entailed establishing rigorous documentation standards, creating accessible archives for future prosecutions, and articulating new legal frameworks that address the limitations of existing international law. As the Tribunal exemplified, alternative forums that emerge from and address grassroots demands should function explicitly as laboratories for legal transformation, testing approaches that might advance emancipatory aims whether by empowering civil society or through adoption by formal institutions at a later stage.
In civil society, movements must connect legal accountability to material consequences. This means translating ICJ and ICC decisions into concrete demands—conditioning military aid on compliance with international law, implementing targeted sanctions against individuals implicated in war crimes, and enforcing existing legal obligations of third states. Civil society mobilization engenders leverage and builds power. Developing sustained campaigns that maintain pressure and attention even as media focus shifts allows communities to shape the international agenda. Creating coalitions that span different communities and movements allows political power to take transnational form beyond the limits of the nation-state system.
The coordination among these spheres is crucial. Formal legal victories provide legitimacy and framing for civil society campaigns; alternative paradigms supply the transformative vision that prevents institutional co-optation; and civil society movements generate the political pressure that makes formal institutions relevant. Each sphere enables and amplifies the others.
Palestine remains the quintessential example of incomplete decolonization, an unresolved remainder from the mid-twentieth century’s anti-colonial movements. The failure of international law to deliver basic protections or self-determination for Palestinians has become a synecdoche for the ongoing colonial character of the norms, doctrines and institutions of the formal international legal order. No example more clearly highlights the limitations, failures, and structural biases of international law than Palestine. Yet, Palestine has also become the site where critical legal approaches have gained unprecedented traction within formal institutions. The struggle for Palestinian liberation may thus be the crucible in which international law’s transformative potential is either forged—or revealed as illusory.
Conclusion
The Gaza Tribunal emerges from the dialectic between institutional promise and limitation. It represents neither a rejection of formal institutions nor mere mimicry of them. Instead, the Tribunal exemplifies the “both/and” approach this moment demands, preserving evidence for future prosecutions while mobilizing in the present. It centers Palestinian voices excluded from formal proceedings, documents violations with higher standards of transparency than official courts, and transforms findings into tools for political mobilization. In this way, the Tribunal embodies what alternative paradigms can offer: not immediate replacements for the ICC or ICJ, but laboratories for imagining what international law might become if built on solidarity rather than state power.
Transforming international law into a tool of liberation requires working simultaneously within and beyond existing institutions. It involves reforming from within while imagining alternatives, establishing legal norms while building political power, and documenting for history while mobilizing for the present. Only by infusing (and at times supplanting) the normative authority of formal institutions with the transformative vision of alternative paradigms can we hope to reshape international law from an instrument that perpetuates domination into one that serves justice.