Published by the Commonwealth of Humanity Tribunal on Crimes Against Humanity
Date: May 26, 2026
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This page stabilizes the core language used across the Commonwealth's First Principles, Claims, Evidence, and Indictment pages.
Universal Moral Humanism
Definition
Every human being matters equally. No one becomes less human because of nationality, race, religion, class, passport, or political usefulness. If an act would be monstrous when done to your own family, it does not become acceptable when done to strangers far away.
Role in the argument
This is the equality premise underneath the Commonwealth's moral judgments. It blocks selective compassion and denies the idea that powerful states may rank some populations as disposable.
What this does not mean
It does not mean all institutions, governments, or systems deserve the same moral presumption as ordinary people. It means every human victim counts equally when those institutions are judged.
Natural Law
Definition
Basic moral limits exist whether governments respect them or not. A state can legalize theft, torture, invasion, starvation, or mass killing on paper, but that does not make those acts right. Law should answer to justice, not the other way around.
Natural law begins from a simple premise: no legal order is legitimate if it depends on treating human beings as disposable. A government may claim authority, pass statutes, issue orders, or invoke national interest, but none of that can turn domination, torture, exploitation, or mass death into justice.
That gives us a practical test for any action or institution: if everyone acted by the same rule, would human coexistence become more stable, equal, and sustainable -- or would it collapse into fear, hierarchy, and violence?
This is a deliberately anti-domination version of universalization: no rule is morally valid if it can survive only through force, deception, arbitrary exemption, or denying affected people a voice in its justification. A moral principle that cannot survive contact with lived human reality is not objective enough.
Role in the argument
This provides the standard above enacted law. It is the reason state legality cannot settle whether a war, sanction regime, or governing structure is just.
What this does not mean
It does not mean every personal intuition is law. It means positive law is judged against durable moral constraints rather than treated as self-justifying.
Popular sovereignty
Definition
Political authority belongs to the people, not to kings, presidents, oligarchs, parties, armies, or foreign powers. Governments are supposed to be tools created by human beings for human beings. When they act against the people and beyond moral limits, they lose any serious claim to rule.
Role in the argument
This grounds the claim that a human community may judge criminal power when states refuse to judge themselves.
What this does not mean
It does not mean any officeholder or electoral machine automatically speaks for the people. It also does not mean majorities may authorize atrocities.
Anti-statist legitimacy
Definition
A government does not become legitimate just because it exists, has uniforms, wins gatekept and non-transparent elections, or controls police and courts. Legitimacy comes from serving human beings without domination, abuse, or fraud. If a state becomes a machine for organized harm, people do not owe it moral obedience just because it calls itself the law.
Role in the argument
This blocks the reflex that existing institutions are morally binding merely because they have continuity, coercive capacity, or official recognition.
What this does not mean
It does not mean all governance is rejected as such. It means governance must justify itself by human outcomes and moral limits, not by self-reference.
Anti-imperialism
Definition
No country, empire, alliance, or wealthy and powerful individual has the right to dominate weaker societies through invasion, occupation, sanctions that crush civilians, puppet rulers, covert sabotage, debt traps, coercion, or economic blackmail. Strength does not excuse crimes against humanity.
Role in the argument
This identifies one of the project's main jurisdictional concerns: the recurring use of concentrated Western and allied power against populations with less capacity to resist or punish it.
What this does not mean
It does not mean non-Western states or local actors are incapable of committing crimes. It means imperial domination remains a central object of scrutiny here.
Anti-capitalism
Definition
Many people are taught that capitalism is simply trade, supply and demand, voluntary exchange, entrepreneurship, or free markets. That is not the actual function of capitalism as a system.
Markets are older and simpler than capitalism. Markets are people exchanging goods and services. Trade, bargaining, production, cooperation, and local enterprise are ordinary human activities. They are not the same thing as capitalism.
Capitalism is the rule of capital. Capital means wealth that has been turned into power over other people. When a small minority of very rich people own or control the things everyone else needs to live and to make a living -- such as land, housing, tools, energy, food, medicine, infrastructure, credit, and information -- that ownership gives them power over everyone else's choices.
One of the many corrosive ways that Capitalism protects itself is by pretending that ordinary human exchange is the same thing as a system that allows private individuals to monopolize essential resources. This hides the coercion inside the system. People are told they are free because they can choose between employers, landlords, lenders, insurers, and sellers, even though the basic conditions of survival are already owned by someone else.
Economic life should be organized around meeting human needs. In capitalism, economic life is organized around private accumulation. Capitalists use their capital to seize, hoard, and defend control over essentials, then use that control to extract rent, profit, labor, obedience, and political power from everyone who depends on them.
A decent society does not allow the conditions of human life to be captured by private individuals and used for private gain.
Role in the argument
This explains why the project treats concentrated ownership as a political power structure rather than a neutral background economy.
What this does not mean
It does not mean ordinary exchange, local trade, or small-scale cooperation are being condemned. The target is organized domination through ownership of essentials.
Anti-human
Definition
A human being remains human no matter what they do. "Anti-human" does not revoke that fact -- it names a forfeiture, a moral posture, and a characterizing intention, not a removal from the species. The label requires both:
- Deliberate killing, destruction of people known to be innocent, intentional systematic removal or degradation of necessities for life from a population, or torture of anyone under any circumstances.
- Direction of or collaboration with organized or hoarded power -- state authority, command structure, institutional position, concentrated wealth.
Neither condition alone qualifies. A lone person who accidentally or even premeditatively kills one other person, answers to community justice; such an act alone does not make them Anti-human.
Where both conditions are met, the Commonwealth withholds two specific things: trust, and refuge from accountability. No amnesty, no statute of limitations, no "following orders" defense, no sanctuary recognized as legitimate -- ever.
Although the Commonwealth will never withhold fair process, it will never relent in pursuing those who conduct their atrocities in the open for all to witness.
Role in the argument
This is the threshold where the Commonwealth's judgment turns from calibrated to absolute. Ordinary wrongdoing is judged by degree and remains open to repair. Anti-human marks what the Commonwealth holds to be beyond repair.
What this does not mean
It does not mean the accused loses fair process. It does not mean ordinary wrongdoing earns the label by itself -- power plus deliberate harm are both required. It does not forbid a victim from personally forgiving; it means the Commonwealth will not forgive on their behalf.
Grounding
Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism: the bourgeois European who recoils at Hitler isn't recoiling from the crime against man as such -- he's recoiling from the fact that Hitler did to Europeans what colonial procedure had already done to the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa, normalized for centuries before it was named a crime. Cesaire's standard for civilizational guilt isn't whether the perpetrator later expresses regret -- it's whether the practice was tolerated, absolved, and looked away from while it was happening to people who didn't count. That's the deception-as-floor point in its original form: the commonest curse is being the dupe in good faith of a collective hypocrisy that misrepresents problems to legitimize the solutions provided for them.
Mahmood Mamdani, Responsibility to Protect or Right to Punish?: On international courts, he argues Western-directed tribunals try the weak and shield the strong, with case selection tracking Western state interest rather than the actual distribution of atrocity.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth: Colonial power was never moved by appeals to its conscience, only by force meeting force -- the colonized learn that the only language such power reliably answers to is one it cannot out-talk.
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Article 27 and Article 29 (full text: icc-cpi.int): Article 27 removes official capacity as a defense -- holding a head-of-state, ministerial, parliamentary, or other government position is, in the treaty's own words, no exemption from criminal responsibility and no ground for a reduced sentence, for the gravest crimes this glossary addresses. Article 29 places those same crimes outside any statute of limitations. Together they put into binding treaty law the same refusal this entry makes in moral language: rank and elapsed time are not currency that buys back what immunity, amnesty, and limitation periods used to sell. (One honest limit: this removal of immunity binds states that joined the Statute; for officials of non-member states it remains a live, unsettled legal question -- itself an illustration of Mamdani's point above.)
Status: This glossary draws directly from the former definitions section of First Principles so the argument's terms can be judged separately from its claims and accusations.