The Special Issue for the Nations International Criminal Tribunal (NICT): The NICT Charter and the Realization of the Rights to Self-Determination of Indigenous Nations and Fourth World Peoples
Hiroshi Fukurai
Fourth World Journal (2025) 25 (1): 1-28
Keywords Indigenous sovereignty, Nations International Criminal Tribunal (NICT), Self- determination, Genocide, Yezidi people, International law, Restorative justice, Colonial violence, Indigenous legal traditions, Decolonial justice
Abstract
Dr. Fukurai constructs an overview of this issue, its engagement with the Nations International Criminal Tribunal (NICT), and the perspectives that drive its articles. The necessity for an Indigenous-centered judicial body within the world system is not novel, and the NICT derives from centuries of Indigenous resistance against the Westphalian statist system. Yet the NICT took shape as a robust structure for accountability and justice based on the work of CWIS founder Dr. Ryser, who ensured that the NICT covered crimes previously excluded from human rights governance, including ethnocide, femicide, ecocide, and culturcide. The article begins with a discussion of the historical roots of the NICT in various resistance movements, as well as its legal precedents in the League of Nations and the Permanent Court of International Justice. The corpus of the NICT is expansive in defining genocide and proactively enforcing accountability mechanisms. Next, it outlines the six articles published and the various lenses through which the court is presented. Finally, it evaluates future directions for the NICT, examining its unique potential to advance both humanistic and ecological aims. These findings underscore the agency of Indigenous nations in sculpting alternative modes of anticolonial sovereignties.
Hiroshi Fukurai
Published June 23, 2025
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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