Editor’s note: The People’s Tribune recently interviewed Camilo Perez-Bustillo about the upcoming series of special hearings to be held in Latin America and the US by the International Tribunal of Conscience of Peoples in Movement (ITCPM). The hearings will deal with the crimes of the Trump regime and its predecessors and accomplices against migrants and refugees within US borders, and internationally against countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Iran and Gaza, among others. Perez-Bustillo is general coordinator of the ITCPM, and is the former executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. He is also a member of the leadership team of Witness at the Border. The hearings will be launched formally in Mexico City on March 18, and a final report is set to be issued in mid-December.
‘The terror in the streets of Minneapolis, LA, and Chicago is the same as the terror [from the US] in the streets of Caracas or Tehran.’
Bob Lee: What is a tribunal of conscience, and how does that work?
Camilo Perez-Bustillo: I think we could say that there’s a long tradition of people’s tribunals. We could describe them that way, or as citizens’ tribunals. And one place to begin is the 1960s during the Vietnam War. There was this concern that was an expression of the anti-war movement, as it emerged internationally, which was trying to apply the same principles that were the basis for trying the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. And essentially the argument that was made, that the Allies applied, what were known as the Nuremberg Principles, has developed into international criminal law.
It was this idea that there were limits to what could be justified even in war, in terms of the conduct of governments. And that the combination of the Holocaust and the abuses that the Nazis committed both against the German people themselves – you know, political persecution, what became the concentration camps and that was initially focused, really, on the political enemies of the Nazi regime, those who were resisting fascism and were persecuted because of their political beliefs, and then eventually became focused on people who were Jewish or otherwise fell outside of the Nazi ideology – and then the countries that were occupied by the Nazis and people who were persecuted because of that, people who resisted Nazi occupation and rule, and on and on.
And so the Nuremberg trials were about that, were about holding accountable the Nazi regime for what became known as international crimes. And out of that there was this whole architecture created that has now of course been put into question because of atrocities, like the genocide in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, the crimes that are piling up as we speak – the intervention in Venezuela, the terrible war that’s ongoing at these moments against the people of Iran, the whole Middle East in flames. But in the sixties it was about Vietnam and Southeast Asia. And so the question that was asked then was, it had been the Allies and the US that had held the Nazis accountable, but who and how could the US itself be held accountable for what it was doing in Vietnam and Southeast Asia?
I think it’s basically the same question many of us are asking ourselves today as we look at this terrible crime at the girls school in Iran, right? I mean, we just observed International Women’s Day just yesterday in the US and around the world, so that crime really stands out…. It’s just the hypocrisy and the criminality goes so deep, right? And I think one dimension of hypocrisy is you apply rules to others that you never intend to be applied to you. And that’s actually one of the basic concepts of this thing that’s called rule of law.
And again, I don’t want to get too technical, but when we as lawyers think about that, rule of law means that the rules that you apply to others also apply to you. It’s like the golden rule. It’s even biblical. So it’s kind of like what happened with the Nazis was the US and the Allies said, well, you can’t do that. But then of course, at that very same moment, the US was bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, right? Literally at the same moment. So even, even at that moment, there was a certain hollowness to what the allies were doing, or the US was doing. And so when this was emerging as an issue in the 1960s – ’66, ’67 – there was something created called the Russell Tribunal.
There was this philosopher in the UK [Bertrand Russell], and of course, Britain had been a key ally, in the Second World War. And then in France, there were two other philosophers, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and they teamed together to create something that was called the Russell Tribunal after Lord Bertrand Russell, this very renowned philosopher and aristocrat. But he was a pacifist and sort of non-conformist in many ways. And he and they said, well, it’s now the US’s turn in the dock, so to speak – the US should be held accountable the same way the Nazis were, because the crimes of the US in Southeast Asia and Vietnam are starting to look a lot like what the Nazis were doing in their own right. And of course, that was a very radical proposition.
So this was very interesting at that moment, because this is at the height of the Cold War, but this wasn’t, you know, the Soviets or the Chinese or whatever, who were putting the US on trial. This was Westerners, Western liberals or, you know, maybe leftists in the case of Sartre and de Beauvoir, you know, they were certainly, radical figures at that moment. But they weren’t from the other side of the Iron Curtain, let’s say. They were widely respected, and they were basically figures who stood for peace and human rights, let’s say, in a broader sense. And so out of that emerged this tradition of what have more generically been referred to as people’s tribunals or tribunals of conscience. So this initiative that we’ve been working hard on stands in that tradition.
Eventually, the Russell Tribunal in the early 1970s turned its attention from the Vietnam War and the war in Southeast Asia…to the US-promoted dictatorships in Latin America in the 1970s.
And, for example, the Nobel Prize winning writer from Colombia, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude, was one of the members of the Russell Tribunal that was convened after the coup in Chile. So that’s another sort of forerunner of what we’re trying to do. So the Russell Tribunal in the seventies focused on cases like Chile or Brazil or Argentina eventually, et cetera. So the Russell Tribunal evolved, it eventually became what’s now known as the Permanent People’s Tribunal based in Rome, that was founded in the seventies, I think, 1978. And it actually emerged through something called the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples in 1976. Anyway, there’s a long story, but the bottom line is, gradually other people’s tribunals have emerged all over the world, sometimes focusing on certain specific conflicts at specific moments, sometimes at the national level, sometimes internationally, sometimes locally.
There are many, many different kinds of people’s tribunals. And ours emerged first in 2010 – the International Tribunal of Conscience of Peoples in Movement – and it focused initially on issues related to the rights of migrants, refugees, and displaced persons. So, Peoples In Movement is an attempt to come up with sort of an integral framework to capture the complexities of those three sectors – migrants, refugees, and the displaced. But it’s gradually expanded its mandate beyond that. It initially emerged because the Permanent People’s Tribunal, which we have a very close relationship with, and have collaborated with, had not yet focused on the issue of serious human rights violations against those sectors. So we thought, well, let’s add to the work of the Permanent People’s Tribunal and focus on that. We were founded in October 2010 in Quito, Ecuador, within the framework of the World Social Forum on Migration.
And then the first full session was in Mexico City in November 2010, and we’ve continued to work throughout the last 15 years. And then towards the end of 2025, and now the beginning of 2026, as this policy of mass deportation and mass detention of the Trump administration evolved – I think Minneapolis was a key turning point, and of course Chicago and LA, but Minneapolis in particular – and then the intervention and invasion of Venezuela, the kidnapping of President Maduro and Celia Flores, and now Iran, we just felt like things were reaching a point of intensity that there was the need for a kind of concerted response. And so there was a combination of things. There’s two dimensions that come together in this initiative. One is the crimes committed by the Trump regime, crimes in the sense of international law, international human rights – crimes within US borders like Minneapolis, LA, Chicago, et cetera, mass deportations, mass detention at the US border and beyond; and crimes committed in contexts like Venezuela, the threats against Cuba and against Colombia, which continue, and against Mexico.
As we speak, there’s a presidential election campaign underway in Colombia – a succession to Petro. There’s a presidential election campaign underway in Brazil – the succession potentially to Lula, he’s running for reelection, but who knows? And there’s this new “Shield of the Americas” initiative as part of the national security strategy. You know, the good news is that Kristi Noem was forced out of DHS as we know, over the weekend. The bad news is she’s now the face of this Shield of the Americas. So it’s good news from the standpoint of migrants in the US, it’s bad news for the rest of the hemisphere. We have to put up with her there. But anyway, it’s a really difficult moment, I think, for all of us, like, how to respond to all of this.
And I think it’s also clear, again, one of the things we try to say in the call to the tribunal, to the initiative that’s just been emerging over the last month, is that the terror in the streets of Minneapolis, LA, and Chicago is the same as the terror in the streets of Caracas or Tehran. And that we have to fight back in the same way and insist on the connections between those two different forms of terror. And that just like there’s two different expressions of terror, let’s say, within US borders and beyond US borders, that there’s kind of an anti-fascist impulse, and there’s also an anti-imperialist impulse. And, and that we have to connect those. And the tribunal initiative is basically a way to try to do that.
BL: Has the call for this particular initiative actually been issued yet?
CPB: It’s come out, let’s say, in an initial way, kind of informally through some of the networks we work most closely with. An initial kind of launch was in Florida this past weekend [in early March], through Witness at the Border, and then coming up in Mexico City on March 18 will be a more formal launch. That’ll be wider, broader, and there will continue to be other launches through various different media and organizations. Gradually more than a dozen key organizations and networks have signed on. I mean, for example, there’s what’s known as the People’s Movement for Peace and Justice, which includes over 50 organizations. So when I say over a dozen, I’m not including the 50 that belong simply to that one network. So if you include those, it’s closer to a hundred now.
The People’s Movement for Peace and Justice is based both in Mexico and the US and it’s mostly grassroots organizations on both sides of the border focused respectively on migrant justice, on stopping arms trafficking, on resisting the policies that push for militarization of drug policy, that promote justice within the framework of so-called free trade – those kinds of issues – and that are grounded both in communities of African descent and indigenous communities, again, on both sides of the border. And it includes organizations in Central America and Colombia. So it’s not just US-Mexico.
There are going to be hearings at the local level, building up the tribunal initiative, kind of feeding into it, and then leading to a binational hearing or a hearing focused mostly on binational issues in Ciudad Juarez and El Paso in September, roughly September 24th to 27th, the dates have been shifting a bit, and then there’s going to be another hearing in Mexico City in mid-October. And then everything’s going to culminate in December, between December 10th – International Human Rights Day – and December 18th, which is International Migrants Day. So basically everything is going to be gearing up between now, March 18th, let’s say, that formal launch in Mexico City, and December 18th, which is going to be sort of continental. So I guess it’s a nine month period between March 18th and December 18th. And that’s the first phase, and then we’re going to stop, assess, and see what, what comes next in 2027.
BL: And so in December, will there be a formal set of findings or a report issued?
CPB: Exactly, yes. As a result of those hearings in September and October, we’ll be disseminating those findings, those verdicts, in December. But it’s that nine month window between March and December that’s the birthing process.
BL: Is there a set of jurists already selected that’s going to be conducting these hearings? Or does that change based on the location?
CPB: It’s not restricted, by any means, only to jurists. There will be jurists involved for sure, but it’s also going to be very interdisciplinary. We refer to them as jurors rather than judges, because we want to keep that sort of participatory, democratic aspect. We don’t want this to be something that’s limited to experts by any means, and we want it to be interdisciplinary in the sense of expertise that’s diverse. Not just legal expertise. And we want everyday folks to participate as well, you know, working people. We want this to be a very democratic process. So we want union members, we want it to be community folks, a jury in the best sense of the word, representative folks that are members of the community where the hearings take place. So a very participatory process. Bottom up.
BL: And is there going to be a series of hearings in different places throughout Latin America and in the US?
CPB: Yes. And so among the partners are organizations that are based way in the deep Southern Cone, all the way literally in Patagonia, in Argentina. There are human rights lawyers based there that we’ve been communicating with and coordinating with. There’s an organization based in Buenos Aires that’s helping us mobilize human rights organizations based in the deep South and all the way up through Brazil, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, up through Venezuela, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Central America, El Salvador, Guatemala. I’m naming places where we have organizations or comrades identified. And then throughout the US from coast to coast. In Florida, we had over 35 people from more than 20 states, for example. And so they’re going back home [from Florida] as we speak. They’ve gone back to their local communities. And they’ll be in their local communities feeding into this process – for example, folks who are focused on resisting the detention centers in their local communities, or participating in rapid response networks, resisting ICE in their neighborhoods, in their churches, in their schools, et cetera.
I have to say, we were really impressed to see all of the resistance in a state like Florida, that’s very conservative. It was really impressive in South Florida, because Florida is a very red state, but there was a really deep tissue of resistance there that we didn’t expect. It was very impressive.
BL: A lot of local people came?
CPB: A lot of local people. There’s something called the Florida Immigration Coalition that includes 83 organizations. There’s 67 counties, and there were 83 organizations throughout Florida. So I was really impressed. And I’ve done work in Florida before. It wasn’t my first time there. And of course, Florida’s renowned for its diversity, especially South Florida, but it’s actually pretty much the whole state. And there’s a long history there of African American civil rights struggle, it’s a very deep history. People don’t normally associate Florida with the Civil Rights Movement, but there’s a very rich history there. And it was a segregated state and, you know, a state that was part of the Confederacy and all that. It’s often forgotten when that story is told. It’s also the state where the Trail of Tears began.
In fact, it’s interesting because, you know, we were mobilizing protest and witness outside this detention center that’s called “Alligator Alcatraz” – the Everglades Detention Center Concentration Camp. It’s located in the middle of the Everglades, and that’s Miccosukee tribal territory, indigenous territory of people who are descended from the Seminole people. And that’s where the Trail of Tears began back in the 1830s. So, again, you don’t have to dig very far, if you just look back a little bit in history, both the origins of Florida in terms of the Civil Rights movement, but also the history of fugitive slaves and of the Trail of Tears. And that’s all wrapped up there together. But literally that’s where the Trail of Tears began — Chief Osceola and his resistance to the Trail of Tears, the forced march all the way to Oklahoma. So that history is present there, and today the Miccosukee are resisting the new stage of dispossession and displacement and defending not only their territory, but the environmental integrity of that land, the Everglades, which of course is a national reserve. So it’s really striking when you just look a little bit beneath the surface.
BL: And as far as the report that ultimately gets issued, is that going to be presented to the United Nations, or how do you envision that being used?
CPB: Absolutely. And it’s so important that you mention that because really we looked at the South Florida convening organized through Witness at the Border in collaboration with the Florida Immigration Coalition and the Florida Interfaith Coalition. And we were there within the context of the 31st consecutive interfaith vigil this past Sunday. We see that as like a key case that will be presented before the tribunal, the case of the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” camp, because not only have there been reports issued by Amnesty International and by Human Rights Watch documenting the very serious violations of international human rights law at that camp because of the terrible conditions under which people are being held – over a thousand migrants are being held there – that include conditions that have been described as equivalent to torture, and the denial of medical care, the negation of asylum. Many of these people are seeking asylum, fleeing what they describe as persecution in Cuba or Venezuela, ironically enough.
So we heard from their family members at this vigil, testimonies from their family members, or recorded testimonies directly from the detainees that were transmitted at the vigil, you know, recordings where they essentially say that they’ve lost two countries – they lost the countries from which they fled, and they came to the US thinking that they were coming to a land of freedom, and then they lost the US. So it’s just extraordinary when you think through those layers, essentially. This was not what they were expecting – the way in which they’re being mistreated – and what this says to them about those dreams and expectations, and what this country has come to mean and stand for, let’s say. But then their claims and demands and complaints about conditions at these camps were brought to the UN, and UN monitors, just as you were suggesting, have further documented that these conditions fit the UN definition, let’s say, of systematic human rights violations.
Amnesty had already said that and Human Rights Watch had said that, but you know, the UN confirmed it. So it’s just striking because the US has become a leading violator of human rights through these kinds of camps. And, of course, that’s what the US says about Venezuela and Cuba and Iran, right? So it’s more than ironic. It’s really, really striking, to say the least. So yes, that’s where this tribunal is going, is to present this documentation that’s developed through the tribunal process to international bodies and courts, and simply to disseminate the findings as broadly as possible. And that’s the idea of aa tribunal of conscience – the ultimate court is public opinion and consciousness, this idea that ideas can be a material force.
BL: Is there anything else on the tribunal that you wanted to add?
CPB: Only this – an invitation to ask those who are reading about the tribunal and hearing about it to join us. Because we want this to be a participatory process, a democratic process, again something built from below, and to join us in your communities, in your organizations and your movements to help us build this road and make this something that really has an impact. We see it as a mass educational process too. We hope that all of us can be participating in and transformed by this in some way.
Bob Lee is a professional journalist, writer and editor, and is co-editor of the People’s Tribune, serving as Managing Editor. He first started writing for and distributing the People’s Tribune in 1980, and joined the editorial board in 1987.
