Indictment

Since last December, the Transnational Migrant Platform Europe (TMP-E), Centro Filipino, the Associació Catalana per la integració d’homosexuals, bisexuals i transexuals inmigrants (ACATHII) and the Transnational Institute have been busy with the process to convene the PERMANENT PEOPLES’ TRIBUNAL (hereafter the PPT) to give clear visibility to the people of migrant persons as an inviolable subject of rights; to identify and judge the “chain” of co-responsibility along the migratory route leading to the violation of migrant people’s human rights; and to urgently provide and foster adequate measures for access to justice.

In this context, the Tribunal will:

• Receive and document rigorously the proposals coming from the communities of migrant and refugee peoples;
• Listen to and make visible the cases of violations of the rights of migrants and refugees;
• Analyse jointly the root causes of forced displacement of migrants and refugees (including trade and investment agreements, global extractivism, as well as the global production chain).
• Determine the responsibilities of governments, including the European Union and other official European bodies.
• Focus on the role of transnational corporations in the global supply chain, as well as in the border regimes.

This is a process we want to build from the bottom, with the people most involve and affected. That is why we call on organizations of migrant and refugee peoples to join this process, as well as networks and platforms supporting the work to denounce the violation of human rights and the rights of peoples happening today in the many borders and daily struggles led by migrants and refugees. The launch of the PPT session will take place in Barcelona on 7th and 8th July 2017. The first hearing is due in December 2017, with the prospect of organising a second hearing in 2018. We hope to bring onboard as many sectors present not only in Spain but also in other parts of Europe, as well as in the countries of origin, transit and destination.

With this background, the sections that follow constitute the general framework –drafted by the members of the prosecution and the convening organisations– for this first hearing, made up of a set of ideas that have been gathered in different reports and addressed to the PPT to hold hearings so as to develop the central lines of the indictment in a more exhaustive way. In this bottom-up construction process, the Mediterranean constitutes a first geographical framework of analysis, which successive hearings add other territorial spaces to, based on the testimonials, reports and evidence submitted by each of the organisations, refugees and migrants.