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.

The Crime of Denial of Democracy

The panel “The Crime of Denial of Democracy” convened at The World Forum on 16 February 2026 brought together Ruti Teitel, Co-Director of the Center for International Law at New York Law School and Chair of the Institute for Global Law, Justice and Policy; András Baka, former President of Hungary’s Supreme Court; Yossi Beilin, former Israeli Justice Minister; Andreas Paulus, former Judge at the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany; Albie Sachs, former Justice of South Africa’s Constitutional Court; Udo Jude Ilo, CEO of the Hague Institute for Innovation of Law and CEO of the Open Society Initiative for West Africa; Biram Dah Abeid, Deputy of Mauritania’s National Assembly; Nataliya Gumenyuk, Ukrainian journalist; Alexandru Muraru, Romanian MP and IPAC Co-Chair; and Zahra Joya, Founder of Rukhshana Media. The panel examined how democratic erosion often happens gradually through captured courts, manipulated elections, weakened media, foreign interference, banned opposition parties, and the hollowing out of constitutional institutions while democratic appearances remain intact.

The speakers called for stronger legal, civic, and international safeguards to protect democracy before collapse becomes irreversible. András Baka warned that “denial of democracy rarely arrives openly”; Albie Sachs reminded the audience that “democracy must be meaningful”; Andreas Paulus stressed that “elections must be acts of self-government, not manipulation from abroad”; Yossi Beilin argued for a new “United Democratic States” structure; Zahra Joya said democracy must be measured by “people’s lived experiences”; Alexandru Muraru warned that dictatorship begins when “alternation of power becomes impossible”; Biram Dah Abeid stated that “a democracy where opposition parties are banned cannot be considered democratic”; Nataliya Gumenyuk said “democracy is a guarantee of sovereignty”; and Udo Jude Ilo emphasized that “the first casualty is free media.” The panel concluded with a clear call to action: define and confront the systematic denial of democracy, protect independent courts and media, resist digital manipulation and foreign interference, stop legitimizing false democracies, and build democracy as a daily civic practice - not only as an election held every few years.

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.

The session “How to End Extreme Poverty with AI?” convened at The World Forum 2026 on 16 February 2026 brought together Steve Keen, Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute for Strategy, Resilience & Security, University College London, and Post-Keynesian economist who predicted the 2008 financial crisis; Clint Borgen, Founder and President of The Borgen Project, which works to bring U.S. political attention to global poverty; and Sandrine Dixson-Declève, Honorary President and Global Ambassador for The Club of Rome, Co-author and Executive Chair of Earth4All, and Founder/Vision Keeper at the Systems Transformation Hub. The panel examined whether AI, automation, and technological progress can help end extreme poverty - or whether, without reform, they may deepen inequality, concentrate wealth and data, and create new forms of economic dependency.

The goal of the session on poverty, economics, and AI was not to settle the question of whether technological progress ultimately reduces or deepens poverty - the speakers were clear that the evidence is mixed and the future deeply uncertain - but to examine how our current economic models, assumptions about growth, and governance systems are being reshaped by energy constraints, inequality, and rapid technological change. The discussion brought together contrasting but overlapping critiques of mainstream economics, highlighting how poverty is not only an issue of income distribution but also of energy access, resource limits, and institutional design in a world increasingly shaped by AI and automation. Rather than offering a single policy pathway, the conversation focused on the tension between the promise of abundance through technology and the risk of “techno-feudal” concentration of power, where wealth, data, and AI infrastructure are controlled by a small elite while large segments of the population face displacement and precarity. Across perspectives, there was a shared concern that without major reforms in ownership structures, global governance, and welfare systems - alongside new ways of measuring progress beyond GDP - technological advancement may deepen inequality rather than resolve it.