Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation

Welcome to the website of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation.  Launched in 1963, the Foundation was established to carry forward Russell's work for peace, human rights and social justice.  Forty years later, it continues to do so.

Here, you will also find information about our journal, The Spokesman, and links to our publications website Spokesman Books.

The Russell Tribunal on Palestine can promote peace, truth and reconciliation

The Israel-Palestine situation demands truth and reconciliation. We hope to aid that process.

Desmond Tutu and Michael Mansfield, guardian.co.uk
Thursday 3 November 2011

RToP ImageOpportunities to break seemingly intractable and deadlocked situations are rare – especially on a scale which has rapidly developed this year from the beleaguered cries of citizenry across North Africa and the Middle East. There is a palpable consensus that the provenance of this movement is lodged firmly in the fundamental prerequisite for meaningful democracy: self-determination. All conventions on human rights have this tenet as a core rationale. Where it is repeatedly denied and suppressed there will never be peace or justice, let alone stability.

The full article is available on our Russell Tribunal page.

Ayse Berktay imprisoned in Turkey

Ayse BerktayAyse was one of the main animators of the World Tribunal on Iraq, which held sessions in Brussels, Tokyo and New York before concluding in Istanbul in 2005. She proposed the Tribunal in 2002, at a meeting of the European Network for Peace and Human Rights, which the Russell Foundation convened in the European Parliament in Brussels. She works as a translator, and her Turkish translation of Black Beauty has been widely acclaimed. 



NATO? No thanks!

The Spokesman 113Spokesman 113

NATO’s regular bombardments of Tripoli have, so far, failed to silence Colonel Gaddafi. Meanwhile, helicopter gunships and drones are deployed against his forces elsewhere in the country, supplementing months of aerial bombing that involves barely half of NATO’s 28 member states, as well as some non-members, too. (There is growing dissent about the campaign within the Organization itself, not least on the part of Germany.) Nevertheless, the skies over Libya are anything but a ‘no-fly zone’, at least as far as NATO is concerned.  

It was with some foresight, then, that the distinguished Irish Foreign Minister, Seán MacBride, rejected an invitation, sent through the American Ambassador in Dublin, to participate in a meeting to discuss the formation of the North Atlantic Alliance. That was in 1949. In his memoir*, MacBride gives several reasons for his opposition:

‘First of all I regarded NATO as being a rather dangerous military alliance that might well involve Europe in another war at more or less the wish of the United States. I could quite well see the American anti-communist view pushing NATO into a cold war first, and then into an active war.’

Tony Simpson, from his Editorial

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This new issue of The Spokesman can be bought from our sister website. 


Call for 2011 World Conference
against A&H Bombs

This year's World Conference against A&H Bombs will gather in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the wake of the devastating nuclear disaster which is still unfolding at Fukushima. Understandably, this is one of the main themes running through this year's Conference. Tony Simpson addresses some of the questions raised by Fukushima in the paper he will present to the Conference.

To mark the 66th anniversary of the nuclear bombardment of these two Japanese cities, on 6 August, the Russell Foundation is publishing a new edition of The Legacy of Chernobyl by Zhores Medvedev. In his preface to the new edition, Dr Medvedev describes how, in 1987, he met with members of the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum. At that time, he had already started to study the available information about what had happened at Chernobyl the previous year, as he was not satisfied with the Soviet report to the International Atomic Energy Agency. His Japanese hosts were not interested in too many details. "We do not find Chernobyl relevant to Japan," one of them told him. "Such accidents can never happen here."

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http://www.antiatom.org 



Ken Coates

Ken CoatesMany spontaneous tributes to Ken Coates were published when his death was announced in June 2010.

We reprint, in Reinventing Socialism, a small selection, together with excerpts from those made at Ken’s funeral in Chesterfield, which was attended by more than 200 people.

 





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Russell Tribunal on Palestine

“No Peace Without Justice”
The London Session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine

By Frank Barat and Michael Mansfield QC

Countless United Nations Security Council and General Assembly resolutions have been passed and violated; The Goldstone Report has been attacked and dismissed and the recent UNHRC fact finding Mission on the Freedom Flotilla incident, condemning Israel’s actions in the strongest possible terms, has been rejected as biased by Israel and was hardly mentioned in the higher spheres of the UN. The reason most often given to explain this lack of political action being that ‘it will harm the peace process.’

We are made to believe that the Israel/Palestine conflict is a never ending one and that, when it comes to this issue, International Law is irrelevant.

But civil society knows better. This conflict is about International Law and nothing else. Not harming the peace process means not harming more than 17 years (from the Oslo agreement in 1993 until now) of settlement building, bombing, murder and assassination, Israeli army aggression, land grab, US vetoes, dispossessions and humiliation of the Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel.

Civil society also knows that under a facade of bland statements ‘condemning’ Israel’s actions, the EU, the USA and the whole international community are in fact actively complicit in those crimes.

That’s where the Russell Tribunal on Palestine (RToP) comes in.

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