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.
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.