Published by the Commonwealth of Humanity Tribunal on Crimes Against Humanity
Date: May 26, 2026

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This page applies the Commonwealth's Procedure directly. Each packet identifies claim type, publication status, evidence basis, foreseeable challenge, and current answer so the argument can be audited one claim at a time.

The status labels on this page use the Procedure's published thresholds exactly: established, strongly inferred, and provisional.

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COH-CLAIM-001

Claim text
Human beings predate every government, every court, and every law written by those who claimed authority over us.

Claim type
Factual

Status
Established

Evidence basis
Anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) have existed for roughly 300,000 years according to all known geological records.^[1] The earliest known states, with centralized governments, courts, written laws, and rulers claiming authority over subjects, appear no earlier than about 5,500 years ago.^[2][3] The archaeological, genetic, and anthropological record confirms that everything before that was stateless: small bands, tribes, or chiefdoms rather than states with coercive monopolies on law, taxation, or violence.^[4]

Strongest foreseeable challenge
The challenge is not likely to dispute the chronology itself, but to argue that early non-state societies still had hierarchy, coercion, or customary authority, and therefore that the claim overstates what statelessness proves.

Current answer
The claim does not require romanticizing stateless societies or denying that pre-state communities could be coercive. The narrower point is chronological and structural: states, courts, and written law are historically late inventions, so they cannot be treated as morally prior to human beings or as preconditions of human coexistence.

Links
Evidence | Procedure | First Principles | Indictment

Sources for COH-CLAIM-001

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COH-CLAIM-002

Claim text
Rich Western governments have repeatedly launched wars that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, yet the people at the top have almost never faced criminal punishment.

Claim type
Interpretive

Status
Strongly inferred

Evidence basis
The page's original evidence set documents a repeated pattern: nearly 400 U.S. military interventions in more than 80 countries since 1776 according to the Military Intervention Project, with independent corroboration from the Congressional Research Service.^[18][19] It also cites major civilian-death cases and supporting records from Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Cambodia, Guatemala, Indonesia, Chile, and Iran Air Flight 655.^{[1][3][6][7][10][12][14][16][17]}

Strongest foreseeable challenge
The strongest challenge is that this compresses very different wars, legal contexts, casualty methodologies, and actor chains into one pattern claim, then adds a broad conclusion about elite impunity that may vary by case.

Current answer
The claim is labeled strongly inferred rather than established for exactly that reason. The public record still shows converging evidence of repeated mass civilian death across multiple Western-led campaigns and a persistent failure to impose criminal punishment on top decision-makers. Readers may contest inclusion boundaries or individual death estimates, but the larger pattern of severe violence plus elite impunity remains well supported.

Links
Evidence | Procedure | Indictment | Dossiers

Sources for COH-CLAIM-002

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COH-CLAIM-003

Claim text
The political figures who commission and protect mass violence are rarely acting alone. Behind them sits a class of financial and corporate interests that owns the political process -- and that ownership is the primary reason criminal accountability never arrives.

Claim type
Interpretive

Status
Strongly inferred

Evidence basis
The claim draws on the page's original synthesis of political economy and accountability literature. It cites Michael Parenti on propertied-class control of Western democratic institutions, David Graeber on debt and financial obligation as instruments of political control, Norman Finkelstein on selective enforcement of international law, Jeremy Corbyn on concentrated corporate power, and Julian Assange on the interlocking structure of intelligence, finance, media, and military power.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]}

Strongest foreseeable challenge
The challenge is that this claim may be accused of collapsing complex political systems into a single ownership theory, or of inferring too much coordination from structural alignment and class interest.

Current answer
The claim expressly denies that every actor must coordinate consciously for the structure to operate. Its narrower point is that concentrated ownership creates aligned incentives, institutional pressure, and veto power that repeatedly protect elite perpetrators. Because that conclusion depends on pattern interpretation rather than one dispositive document, the page labels it strongly inferred rather than established.

Links
Evidence | Procedure | Indictment | Dossiers

Sources for COH-CLAIM-003

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Status: This page is an initial public baseline. Additional claim packets are in preparation, and serious factual or procedural challenges should be answered under the Commonwealth's published correction and rebuttal process.