For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq by Ayça Çubukçu

"For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq" by Ayça Çubukçu

Associate Professor in Human Rights & Co-Director of LSE Human Rights

London School of Economics and Political Science

The global anti-war movement against the invasion and occupation of Iraq crystalized on February 15, 2003, when millions of people simultaneously demonstrated in six hundred cities around the world. The World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) emerged from this global anti-war movement in order “to tell and disseminate the truth about the Iraq war.” Between 2003 and 2005, in the absence of official institutions of justice willing or able to perform the task, the WTI established a globally networked platform where the reasons and consequences of the war could be investigated, and those responsible for the destruction of Iraq could be publicly judged. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with WTI activists around the globe, this lecture will examine the transnational praxis of the World Tribunal on Iraq to address challenges of forging global solidarity through an anti-imperialist politics of human rights and international law.