The Crime of Aggression Court: How to hold Heads of State accountable for oppression, war and mass killings

The workshop at The World Forum 2026 in Berlin, convened to advance the creation of a Permanent Court for the Crime of Aggression and moderated by Geoffrey Robertson KC. The workshop brought together international jurists, human rights lawyers, former heads of state, constitutional court judges, Nobel laureates, and senior figures from international prosecution bodies to confront the accountability gap left by the ICC's limited aggression jurisdiction and the structural paralysis of the UN Security Council. The call to action urged European and democratic governments to establish and operationalise the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression without delay - physically seating it in The Hague, appointing judges and a prosecutor, and beginning evidence preservation and indictments. The workshop further called for permitting trials in absentia with due process safeguards, amending the Rome Statute to close the International Criminal Court's aggression jurisdiction gap, linking judicial findings to Magnitsky-style sanctions (travel bans, asset freezes, financial exclusion), channelling the approximately $300 billion in frozen Russian state assets into a reparations mechanism for victims, and maintaining justice as a parallel track independent of any peace negotiations - because if the architects of aggression remain beyond law, the law itself has already been defeated.

Political Correctness in Open Societies - new rules for language, humour, science and behaviour

This panel discussion at The World Forum 2026 in Berlin, convened to examine what has changed in the landscape of free expression, cancel culture, humour, and algorithmic control. The panel brought together leading constitutional scholars, a former Constitutional Court Justice, political cartoonists operating under authoritarian pressure, documentary filmmakers, and whistleblower protection advocates to confront how cancel culture has migrated from left to right, how state power has replaced grassroots pressure as the primary force of suppression in the United States, and how a handful of private technology companies now exercise near-total black-box control over algorithmic amplification. The call to action urged individuals and institutions to adopt consistent neutrality in free speech advocacy - defending expression regardless of political direction - and to distinguish between legitimate criticism and punitive cancellation. The panel further called for mandating algorithmic transparency as a non-negotiable public interest requirement, restoring and protecting public funding for independent arts and media, adopting truth and tangible harm as the legal standard for any restriction on speech - with the burden of demonstrating harm falling on those seeking to restrict, not on those speaking - and treating humour as democratic infrastructure rather than decoration, because the ability to laugh at power is one of democracy's most vital freedoms and its erosion is a symptom of democratic decline as much as government censorship is.