As convoys of heavy trucks carry fracking equipment into new oil fields in neighborhoods and wildlands around the world, an alliance of human rights organizations is making plans to put the entire practice of hydraulic fracturing on trial. The court is the Permanent People's Tribunal, a descendant of the Vietnam War-era International War Crimes Tribunal. The Peoples' Tribunal is a branch of no government on Earth. It has no power of enforcement. It has no army, no prison, no sheriff.
So what's the point?
The point is that it matters to tell the truth in a public place. It matters to affirm universal standards of right and wrong, to clearly say, "There are things that ethical people do not do to one another and to the Earth."
It matters especially when international and national justice systems, even in purported democracies, are seemingly incapable of protecting people and the commons - air, water, fertile soil, stable climate and all the other necessary conditions for the exercise of basic human rights. It is especially important when transnational corporations are allowed to write the laws that regulate their own actions, making their transgressions effectively "legal," no matter how outrageous.
Under those circumstances, "People themselves must re-imagine, occupy and appropriate the legal process to actively defend their rights," according to Tribunal documents. The people themselves, writes Jayan Nayar, lecturer in law at the University of Warwick, must create "a public record of the truth - and of the crime of denial.
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