Putting Aggression on Trial: The Rojava Verdict

Against the quiet backdrop of a people's tribunal, away from the formal corridors of The Hague or the official offices of global diplomacy, justice and calls for accountability diverged from traditional legal channels. There were no armies at the gates. No formally instituted judge was there to represent the state's authority, nor were there any promises of enforcement. The Rojava Tribunal, called by the Permanent People’s Tribunal, raised a question which the world’s legal institutions have long ignored: what happens when a state declares open war against a people and their claims to statehood?  

This symbolic court examined Turkey’s incursions into Rojava, the Kurdish-led autonomous region of northeast Syria. It addressed the gravest doctrines of international law: aggression, occupation, and crimes against humanity. It did so through the perspective of people not frequently heard—the voiceless, the besieged, and the stateless. 

The case of Rojava v. Turkey was more than a mere symbolic trial. It was a confrontation of the structure of humanitarian law. This tribunal has become a focus point of increasing pressure in international legal discourse, where moral urgency confronts legal inertia—it is the people, not the power, that put aggression on trial.

Rojava, Turkey, and the Kurdish Question

To thoroughly understand the legal-political rupture represented by Rojava in opposing Turkey, it is necessary to revisit a century of betrayal and silence. The Kurdish nation is one of the largest stateless nations in the present-day world, with a population numbering over 30 million spread across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. International law—vitiated by sovereign bargains and postcolonial boundaries—has worked to render their presence peripheral, and their plight merely incidental. 

International law touches them on the rare occasion when their existence poses a threat to sovereign order, most recently, in the wake of the First World War, when in the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) there was an attempt to provide a homeland for the Kurds. Just three years later, though, it was largely deemed irrelevant by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), a treaty establishing the Republic of Turkey and laying down the borders of the Middle East without any acknowledgement of Kurdish autonomy. The pattern began: acknowledgement of Kurdish identity whenever politically expedient, ignorance whenever it interfered with the status quo. 

The situation led to severe repression and cultural extermination for decades. Communal languages, dressing, and politics were criminally punished. Entire communities were uprooted from their localities. Resistance to this systematic marginalization created the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in 1978, an entity that led to an armed conflict that lasted from the 1980s to the 1990s. 

Turkey's campaigns against the PKK, designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, the U.S., and the EU, were characterized by widespread violations of human rights, including forced displacements, arbitrary detentions, and extrajudicial killings. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, more than 3,000 Kurdish villages were destroyed in this period, displacing more than two million people.

Throughout the civil war, as the Syrian state collapsed, the Kurdish populations in the north found themselves in a rare moment where they could self-govern. Rojava was born at that time. It was a democratic union of cantons (namely, Afrin, Kobanî, and Jazira) linked together, having a charter rooted in pluralism, gender equality, and environmental sustainability. The Democratic Union Party (PYD), along with its military branch, People's Protection Units (YPG), took over the empty ground left by Assad's forces. Such military units were integrated later into the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)—the United States' major partner in the fight against ISIS. 

The achievements of Rojava were substantive from the bottom up. Grassroots councils, gender-neutral militias, and community-based justice systems filled the void created by sectarianism with effective governance. However, this was against the background of Turkey's expansionist goals in the region. The PYD/YPG was seen as an extension of the PKK and, hence, an existential threat to Turkey’s borders. 

Between 2016 and 2019, Turkey carried out multiple cross-border operations into northern Syria, notably: Operation Euphrates Shield, Operation Olive Branch, and Operation Peace Spring. These were undertaken under the promise of "clearing of terrorists" from the border, according to repeated statements by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In reality, these operations were military occupations of Kurdish territory and were embellished with high levels of human rights abuses. 

The UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria (2020) noted looting, arbitrary detention, and forced displacement happening in Turkey's occupation of Afrin and Tel Abyad. The European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) published a 2024 report titled The Neglected Atrocities of Afrin, citing serious violations of the Geneva Conventions such as torture, sexual violence, and enforced disappearances through the acts of militias allied to Turkey. 

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have continuously flagged war crimes and demographic engineering inside these zones. For instance, there has been forced Arab resettling to decrease the Kurdish presence, representing a war crime under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Despite proof of these crimes, there have been no international proceedings initiated against Turkey. Geopolitical interests—Turkey being a NATO member, active in the management of the Syrian refugee crisis, and of strategic value to the West—have stifled accountability. 

This impunity has a political dimension and a structural one. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) hears cases only between sovereign states. The International Criminal Court (ICC), in theory, is empowered to prosecute crimes such as aggression and ethnic cleansing. However, it acts only when jurisdictional triggers are present, either with approval by a state party or referral by the UN Security Council—neither of which is likely to happen in Turkey's situation. In Turkey’s case, the UNSC is unlikely to authorize a referral because Turkey is geopolitically important, and permanent members like Russia or China (and potentially even the U.S.) could veto any attempt to refer Turkey to the ICC.

Rojava cannot, therefore, take on legal proceedings since it has no recognized statehood. The ICC declares in its interest to uphold the rights of individuals, yet these individuals paradoxically have no legal rights in that court. 

As legal scholar Aldo Zammit Borda notes in Legitimation Crisis or Access to Justice?, People's Tribunals are often the only available legal forum for communities left outside formal systems of justice. These tribunals lack coercive power, but they provide something that official courts frequently cannot: the ability to document, analyze, and condemn violations where international law proves itself ineffective in practice.

The Rojava Tribunal: Structure and Significance

In a world in which the scaffolding of international justice too often collapses under the weight of realpolitik, the Permanent People's Tribunal (PPT) stands the test of moral jurisprudence. Founded in 1979 in Bologna by Lelio Basso, a jurist and an anti-fascist senator, the Tribunal does not sanction itself on state authorization; rather, it believes that people have a right to justice even if states trample down such rights. It is built to be a court that listens to the unheard.

Inspired by the Russell Tribunal on Vietnam (1966-67), the PPT has judged the scars of the world that official international law ignores: the Bhopal tragedy, the Palestinians' plight, the dictatorships in Latin America, and the Yazidi genocide. From the point of view of coercive power, it is impotent. However, its proceedings reverberate within scholarly, political, and human rights circles, as part of what legal theorist Martti Koskenniemi calls "the gentle civilizer of nations"—law as conscience, not command.

The PPT has no international character, unlike the ICC or the ICJ, as it is not constrained by either state sovereignty or procedural formalism. Its strength lies in storytelling, where no other court will. According to Shadi Sadr in her JURIST commentary entitled People of the World as the Enforcers of International Law, the Rojava Tribunal is a counter-hegemonic articulation of justice. It is a site where law is free from capture by geopolitics.

The tribunals mimic the structure of formal courts by having panels of judges, formal hearings, legal submissions, assessments of evidence, and reasoned verdicts. This lends their findings a more judicial than an advocacy or campaigning character, which is typical of human rights NGOs. It sharpens and makes the legal analysis more persuasive. 

Additionally, the legitimacy of tribunals is derived from the moral authority of peoples and not states. They symbolically subvert the traditional system with states judging individuals and not people judging states. As such, it carries much more symbolic power in the discourse of international law, especially where official bodies fail to act.

However, judgments remain unenforceable. Usually, they serve as precursors for nascent international norms, as seen in the Palestine People’s Tribunal held in Geneva or the articulation of corporate complicity in environmental crimes. The Rojava Tribunal goes forward in this tradition, weaving legal, historical, and human rights strands into a fabric that, while not binding, is legally literate and morally urgent.

The Rojava tribunal was inaugurated in early February 2025 and brought together a panel of recognized international judges, legal scholars, and specialists in human rights. The Tribunal was to host public, recorded hearings for several weeks (a 4-day livestreamed session from The Hague), an evidence collection from displacement survivors, former members of the Syrian Democratic Forces, humanitarian workers, and legal analysts.

Testimony, witnessed documentation, including statements from Amnesty International, the ECCHR's Afrin report, and the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry into Syria, were all collected on this issue. The Geneva Conventions gave much stress in this case, particularly addressing population transfers, attacks against civilians, and extrajudicial killings—namely, Article 3 and Article 49 of the Fourth Convention. The Court cited the Rome Statute of the ICC, especially Articles 8 and 7, respectively dealing with war crimes and crimes against humanity, mainly operating on the legal standard characterizing the acts of Turkey.

The counsel of the Kurds introduced quite an astonishing, yet realistic, characterization of Turkey's intervention, declaring it as an act of aggression engineered for the target of dismantling a de facto autonomous polity under the cover of counter-terrorism measures. Testimony before the Tribunal spoke to the fact that what Turkey did from 2018-19 in Afrin, Ras al-Ayn, and Tel Abyad was a breach of Article 5(1) of the Definition of Aggression contained in UN General Assembly Resolution 3314. In this definition, acts such as military occupations, bombardments, and blockades are considered acts of aggression that contravene the UN Charter.

Witnesses, including Kurdish residents of Afrin and on-the-ground human rights investigators, described scenes of cultural erasure, gender violence, and forced displacement, not as collateral damage, but as structural components of Turkey's policy. This is consistent with the doctrine of indirect occupation, under which a state uses proxy militias to exert control without direct administrative oversight, thereby seeking to flout legal responsibility.

On March 26, 2025, the trial ended. The court’s words were heavy, if not prosecutorial. The Tribunal found Turkey's military interventions in Rojava to be acts of aggression in breach of international humanitarian law and the basic principle of non-intervention. The judges stated Turkey violated Article 1 of the Geneva Conventions, obligating all parties and not just belligerents to "respect and ensure respect" of humanitarian norms.

It found credible evidence for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including targeted killings, unlawful confinement, torture, and the use of Turkish-backed militias to enforce occupation. The tribunal’s findings were based on a combination of primary and secondary sources. There was also on-the-ground documentation collected by Kurdish civil society groups. A legal team, composed of international lawyers and human rights experts, was tasked with verifying the evidence and ensuring procedural fairness. Relying on the Rome Statute, it affirmed that these acts would be international crimes in nature, even though Rojava could not pursue a case at the ICC. 

Besides legal determinations, the judgment recognized the suffering of the Kurdish people. The Rojava Tribunal has not only passed a judgment but also an act of rebellion against the silence of international law and institutions.

Aggression, Occupation, and Crimes Against Humanity

In the world of international law, aggression will often find a place as the primordial sin; the offense which opens the gates to war crimes, occupation, and human suffering. Its definition, however, has remained both powerful and elusive, being born out of anxieties of the Cold War and post-colonial compromises. In Rojava v. Turkey, it opened avenues not only to the application of legal standards but also to the reclamation of the term's normative weight in a global order more and more indifferent to its invocation.

The Tribunal anchored itself in the Definition of Aggression adopted by the United Nations General Assembly (Resolution 3314, 1974). Article 3 of this Resolution enumerates acts which qualify as aggression, including invasion by armed forces, military occupation of territory, and bombardment thereof. Though not binding, the Resolution has attained customary legal status such that it governs the interpretation of aggression in international fora. 

Moreover, the Tribunal referred to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Articles 8 bis and 5) and the Elements of Crimes, which define the crime of aggression as “the planning, preparation, initiation or execution” of an act of aggression which, by nature, gravity, and scale, constitutes a manifest violation of the UN Charter. 

In employing this framework, the Tribunal closely examined two ensuing Turkish incursions into Afrin in 2018 and 2019, “Operation Peace Spring” within Ras al-Ain and Tel Abyad, regarding both as acts of unprovoked aggression across the border. Challenging Turkey's claims of counterterrorism in line with Article 51 of UN Charter (Right to Self-Defense), the Tribunal found that there was no evidence of any armed attack coming from Rojava that would have justified such operations in terms of the Caroline test of necessity and proportionality (a test existing since 1837 but reaffirmed in modern customary law).

The Turkish operations that revolved around coordinated troop movements, artillery strikes, and the use of proxy militias were adjudged to transcend the threshold of "manifest violation" as per the Rome Statute. The Tribunal pointed out that the intent was not neutralizing any threat; rather, it disrupted autonomous Kurdish governance, a political aim hidden behind the rhetoric of security. 

The Tribunal considered the acts from the standpoint of customary international humanitarian law, particularly the Hague Regulations (1907) and Fourth Geneva Convention (1949), even if Turkey refuted the formal occupation of northern Syria. As per Article 42 of the Hague Regulations, the territory is deemed under occupation when “actually placed under the authority of a foreign hostile army.” The Hague Regulations (1907) are significant here because they establish that a territory, if considered occupied, is subject to specific legal protections under the law of occupation. The occupier is obliged to maintain public order, respect existing laws (Art. 43), protect personal and property rights (Art. 46), and treat public property as a temporary administrator, not an owner (Art. 55). 

At Afrin and other places, de facto control was found by the Tribunal to be exercised through some military presence along with affiliated militias, parallel administrative structures, forced changes in school curricula, and display of Turkish flags. All these established the legal test of occupation according to both the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)’s Customary IHL Study (Rule 42) and ICJ jurisprudence, such as the advisory opinion of Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (2004).

More worrisome, however, was Turkey's selective withdrawal of troops, such as from a Syrian National Army (SNA)-led area that is managed with logistical and financial backing from Turkey. With that indirect occupation, the Tribunal concluded, Turkey has achieved being shielded from any direct legal responsibility, although Article 1 of the Geneva Conventions does stipulate that occupying powers are still responsible for acts committed by the proxy forces under their control. 

The pattern of coordinated systematic abuses against civilians formed the basis of the Tribunal's findings. The judges invoked Article 7 of the Rome Statute while determining whether the Turkish-backed operations bore the characteristics of crimes against humanity, including deportation, persecution, enforced disappearance, and other inhumane acts.

Given the lack of formal access to the state archives or cooperation from the Turkish government, the Tribunal relied on multiple sources, including open-source intelligence and satellite imagery, testimonies from NGOs like the Rojava Information Centre, and some direct accounts from survivors. It did not conduct a full criminal trial, where adversarial proceedings (defense vs. prosecution), live cross-examination, and formal evidentiary exclusion rules would apply because they lacked state archives and the power to subpoena documents or witnesses from the state or the defense side.

This methodology, while not being the conventional means of evidence collection in any formal judicial consideration, was analytically tested by a legal standard of "reasonable grounds to believe"—that being the evidentiary threshold usually relied upon by the ICC Pre-Trial Chambers while issuing warrants. 

The Rojava Tribunal draws together these legal standards in showing how aggression, occupation, and crimes against humanity are not mere abstractions but names for suffering, erasure, and silence. They resuscitate the moral force of international crimes into human realities. 

Human Stakes: Kurdish Voices and Ground Realities

The Permanent People’s Tribunal was a rare open space in which Kurdish civilians were heard without their thoughts being filtered by higher powers. Survivors, journalists, aid workers, and exiled local officials gave testimony—voices frequently buried under the burdensome weight of geopolitics and dismissed formally by international bodies as non-state noise. These were not stories of strategy, but of loss.

A mother from Afrin testified that when Turkish-backed militias abducted her son, he was later found tortured and lifeless at a detention site. Another described entire Kurdish neighborhoods in Tel Abyad forcibly emptied and reoccupied by Arab Syrian families from other parts of the country, resettled by Turkish forces. This pattern was echoed in multiple human rights reports, including from the ECCHR and Amnesty International.

The Tribunal heard evidence of systematic attacks on cultural expression: burning Kurdish books, removing language teaching, and closing women's councils. What emerged was a coordinated suppression, not just through the military, but also ideologically, of Kurdish autonomy. It was not mere territorial occupation. It was also an occupation of identity.

In this case, international law was both a shield and an accomplice. Its rules, meticulously codified in Geneva and Rome, contained promises regarding the protection of specific civilians. Stateless peoples like the Kurds, who have neither an externally defined sovereignty nor UN representation, rarely find such protections available to them in regulatory bodies that generally bear enforcement power. 

As the Tribunal observed, non-state actors remain largely invisible in formal mechanisms such as the ICJ and ICC unless a state refers them or accepts jurisdiction. This "structural invisibility," as Judge Francesco Martone of the PPT termed it, renders legal recognition conditional on the very political inclusion that stateless peoples are denied.

Thus, this is not only a legal event but an indictment of silence—the silence of the Security Council, the silence of regional powers, the silence of a legal system that still struggles to recognize violence when it does not arrive wearing the insignia of a recognized state. 

The evidence presented before the Rojava Tribunal were, legally speaking, "evidence." But they are also acts of defiance against the erasure attempted by history. By listening, the Tribunal began to construct what formal systems of law have not yet accomplished: a record of Kurdish suffering and survival.

What Now? Reforming Humanitarian Law and Ensuring Accountability

The judgment has been read, testimony recorded, and the symbolic gavel lowered; the silence that now follows the Rojava Tribunal is not a silence of closure but a confrontation with the limits of international law as it stands, and with the urgent task of reimagining what it could become.

The architecture of international justice, as vast as it may be, was never designed for the stateless. The space of the stateless—the crux of the problem—exists within the legal shadows. They are denied standing, agency, and, more often than not, even naming rights in the forums that purport to speak on behalf of humanity. This is an asymmetry that needs to be repaired.

One proposal is to open up jurisdictional gateways at the ICC or ICJ to include non-state actors whose populations are demonstrably affected by crimes under international law, whether that’s the Kurds, Palestinians, Sahrawis, or Rohingya. Precedent exists in, for example, Palestine's acceptance of ICC jurisdiction, and such flexibility must be institutionalized and broadened.

There also exist hybrid accountability models—part tribunal, part truth commission—where stateless people could be given legitimacy and voice. They can take inspiration from the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia and the Special Court for Sierra Leone. These mechanisms would blend international oversight with local ownership. They would make up for what they lack by way of enforcement with moral clarity and evidentiary preservation. 

Of course, it is one thing for the law to be inventive; it is another for that invention to have legal effect. Beyond the political brawn of the UN Security Council or the consensus of state parties, enforcement remains elusive. Turkey, like many other states accused of aggression, will not heed judgments that it doesn't recognize. 

This is not, however, the end of the story. The normative pressure builds gradually through reiteration and judicial precedent. “Soft law"—people’s tribunals, scholarly commentary, investigative reports—can, over many turns of time, become customary law that states are forced to interact with for legitimacy's sake. 

Documentation, transparency, and narrative consistency become weapons in their own right. As legal scholar Aldo Zammit Borda has argued, people's tribunals "generate discursive authority," which will gradually shift to legal gravity. They plant the seeds of jurisprudence in the soil where formal institutions have failed to till. 

It is civil society that, in the absence of state consent, often keeps the conversation and the conscience alive. Human rights NGOs, Kurdish legal advocates, journalists, and international observers have an important role to play in both generating evidence and defining its implications for wider audiences.

Legal scholars must move beyond critique to offer frameworks that are more imaginative than purely traditional. After all, every cornerstone of modern humanitarian law was initiated not in halls made of power but in minds unwilling to accept suffering as destiny.

The world which international law originally created no longer exists. The clear-cut distinction between state and non-state, between combatant and civilian, between sovereign and subject has been damaged by the weight of proxy wars and transnational militias, by armies of people abandoned by geopolitics. Rojava is not an exception. It is a preview. And to respond to the realities mentioned above, the law must evolve. 

This is not only through doctrine, but through courage as well. We need more courageous interpretations of aggression. We need jurisdictional frameworks that do not view stateless peoples as anomalies but as rightful owners. And above all, we must do justice not in a reactive sense, but as something to be designed, proactively built, rather than applied after ruin. 

The Tribunal did not end Turkey's aggression. It did not stop the demographic restructuring of Afrin nor return the displaced to their homes. However, it posed the right questions. It dignified forgotten voices. It offered vital vision of a legal world where justice is an aspiration for not just states but peoples as well. 

Edited by Thenthamizh SS

Eshal (she/her) is a student of law at the National Law University Odisha, and Senior Copyeditor at Political Pandora.

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References:

• Borda, Aldo Zammit. Legitimation Crisis or Access to Justice? On the Authority of International People’s Tribunals. Opinio Juris, 2024, www.opiniojuris.org/legitimation-crisis-or-access-to-justice. Accessed 19 Apr. 2025.

• Charter of the United Nations. 26 June 1945, 1 UNTS XVI, www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter. Accessed 19 Apr. 2025.

• ECCHR (European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights). Crimes in Syria: The Neglected Atrocities of Afrin. 2024, www.ecchr.eu/en/case/afrins-forgotten-crimes.  Accessed 19 Apr. 2025.

• International Committee of the Red Cross. Customary IHL Database. ICRC, ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl. Accessed 19 Apr. 2025.

• International Criminal Court. Elements of Crimes. ICC, 2011, www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/ElementsOfCrimesEng.pdf. Accessed 19 Apr. 2025.

• International Criminal Court. Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. 17 July 1998, UN Doc. A/CONF.183/9, www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/RS-Eng.pdf. Accessed 19 Apr. 2025.

• Permanent People’s Tribunal. Rojava Peoples’ Tribunal Preliminary Statement. Feb. 2025, rojavapeoplestribunal.org/preliminary-statement-february-2025. Accessed 19 Apr. 2025.

• Permanent People’s Tribunal. Recording of Rojava People’s Tribunal Hearing. 2025, www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_7oBEVpjqI&t=15756s. Accessed 19 Apr. 2025.

• Sadr, Shadi. “People of the World as the Enforcers of International Law: Takeaways from the Rojava Tribunal.” JURIST – Commentary, 2025, www.jurist.org/commentary/2025/03/sadr-rojava-tribunal. Accessed 19 Apr. 2025.

• United Nations General Assembly. Definition of Aggression, Resolution 3314 (XXIX). 14 Dec. 1974, A/RES/3314(XXIX), undocs.org/en/A/RES/3314(XXIX). Accessed 19 Apr. 2025.

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Keywords: Rojava Tribunal, Kurdish Autonomy, Turkey Aggression, Human Rights Violations, Stateless Nations, Syria Conflict, Afrin Occupation, Permanent People’s Tribunal, Geneva Conventions, Kurdish Rights, International Law, Proxy Militia, Cultural Suppression, Kurdish Identity, Humanitarian Law.