Signs at a march in San Luis Potosí. Marcos Guevara/Flickr. Some rights reserved.
The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT), founded in 1979 and now operating under the auspices of the Lelio and Lisli Basso Foundation, is the successor to the first such tribunal created by the philosopher Bertrand Russell to judge crimes committed by the US government during the Vietnam war, and the subsequent tribunal organized with the writer Julio Cortázar to adjudicate Argentina’s military dictatorship, state crimes and crimes against humanity. Recently, a chapter of the PPT was convened in Mexico under the title "Free Trade, Violence, Impunity, and the Rights of the People in Mexico", which held 10 different hearings from 2011 to 2014 before a panel of selected national and international judges.
The trial began in May 2012 in Ciudad Juárez, a city emblematic of femicide, with an indictment on behalf of civil society that centered on complaints of the “looting and plundering of Mexico”. More than 300 different organizations and groups representing social movements presented their allegations, the sheer breadth of which clearly demonstrates the total impunity that reigns in the face of systematic and serious rights violations.
