The upcoming Carrizo Comecrudo Tribunal for Human Rights connects the dots between petrochemical development, violence against Indigenous women, environmental justice, border militarization, and migration.
When land or community wellbeing has suffered injustice, we often look to the courts to redress any rights violations. But what if the corporate and governmental actors responsible for these violations have an outsized hand on the scale? Where the outcomes of the legal process have been historically weighted against the rights of communities, Indigenous nations, and ecosystems—and especially where the conceptual roots of present-day violations are baked into the law itself—the people’s tribunal has emerged as a way for communities to bring cases against those who have harmed them, to hear evidence in a public forum, and to pursue their own visions of justice.
As an autonomous alternative to state-based legal authorities, people’s tribunals have been organized in response to war crimes, genocide, and other violations of human and Indigenous rights around the world.
More recently, an international people’s tribunal on climate justice emerged as a central demand of the 2010 World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. On a local level, Appalachian communities have also used the people’s tribunal to call attention to the deep legacies of anti-Black racism exposed by the siting of fracking infrastructure in Buckingham County, VA; this local tribunal eventually became part of a permanent, or standing, people’s tribunal on fracking based in Rome.
According to the permanent people’s tribunal (PPT) on fracking, the rulings produced by PPTs are non-binding; however, “the legal standards against which defendants are judged are those expressed in broadly endorsed international human rights law.”
This Friday and Saturday, May 22-23, the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas will host a Native people’s tribunal responding to the myriad violations of human rights, Indigenous sacred sites, and ecological integrity unleashed in the Rio Grande Valley—traditional homelands of the Esto’k Gna (Carrizo/Comecrudo)—on account of intensifying extraction activity in the region (not to mention border militarization and wall construction.)
Seven of the 28 laws being waived to build the border wall. Images: Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas
A two-day online event, the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas will host their Tribunal For Human Rights on Friday, May 22 (9am-2pm CST) and Saturday, May 23 (10am-2pm CST), in partnership with the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy (GCLP) and the Gulf South for a Green New Deal Coalition.
According to GCLP, the tribunal:
will compile an official record of past and present harms by governments and fossil fuel corporations against the Esto’k Gna people of Southern Somi Se’k (i.e. Texas), through community and expert testimony. We will hear from leaders of the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, allied First Nations, national climate and environmental experts, and local community members about the impact of the petrochemical and US border wall build-out. Testimony and panels will connect the dots between petrochemical development, violence against Indigenous women, environmental justice, and border militarization and migration.