Permanent Peoples' Tribunal rules Canada violated international law on Indigenous genocide

An international tribunal ruled Wednesday that Canada has violated international law by failing to investigate and prosecute crimes against Indigenous people, marking a sharp judgment on a decade of largely unmet reconciliation promises.

The Permanent Peoples' Tribunal, a panel of seven judges created in 1979 to investigate crimes against humanity, issued a 78-page final judgment finding Canada in "deliberate state of contempt" for refusing to sign and enforce international human rights doctrines on genocide, enforced disappearances, and apartheid.

The tribunal cited residential schools and forced sterilization of Indigenous women as policies amounting to crimes against humanity with genocidal intent. "The atrocities visited on the bodies and spirits of children in the schools, on young women in the hospitals; the thousands of known deaths of children in segregated hospitals, in the schools, the unmarked graves and the ashes of babies in furnaces – are the physical manifestation of a genocidal colonialism," the panel wrote.

The ruling comes on the fifth annual National Truth and Reconciliation Day, marking a stalled reckoning. Despite Justin Trudeau's 2019 acceptance of genocide findings from the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls National Inquiry and a 2022 House of Commons motion on treatment of Indigenous peoples, the tribunal found no accountability or policy changes have followed.

The tribunal specifically noted that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's 2015 finding that residential schools amounted to cultural genocide has been "mostly deprived of practical effect by the extremely limited criminalization of genocide in Canadian domestic legislation." Canada's domestic law contains few tools to prosecute the historical crimes the tribunal documented.

The panel released recommendations across 10 areas directed at governments at all levels, the Catholic Church, and other religious organizations. It also demanded that the Independent Assessment Process records — testimonies from nearly 40,000 residential school survivors — be preserved. A 2017 Supreme Court of Canada ruling currently allows those records to be permanently destroyed in September 2027.