05/30/2026
The co-chair of the Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT) on missing Indigenous children and unmarked graves in Canada says the panel of international human rights experts had “no difficulty” in accepting that the “pattern of composite acts” described by Indian residential schools survivors and other experts over the course of the last week “constitutes genocide.”
“In international law, genocide need not involve mass killings,” said co-chair Frances Webber, an English barrister. “It can be a slow and continual process taking place over centuries. In Canada, the genocidal acts include the forcible transfer of children from one group to another group. The genocidal intent behind the forced removal of children was explicit.”
Though members of the PPT use legal language, describing their members as “judges,” accusations against states as “indictments,” and the person levying the indictment as a “prosecutor,” the PPT is a legally nonbinding international forum. Its role is to assess the likelihood that states or large organizations could be found guilty of major crimes if in fact they could realistically be prosecuted.
In its 57th iteration, the PPT spent the week in Montreal considering whether Canada’s actions in Indian residential schools rose to the level of genocide and crimes against humanity.
Webber was reading a preliminary statement by PPT’s panel of judges, whom she noted had had less than 24 hours to consider the bulk of what they had heard over the week. Their full judgment will appear after they have had time to consider the evidence in full.
Given, Webber said, that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, the Canadian Parliament and the Vatican have acknowledged that Canada’s program of residential schools constituted genocide, it was easy to arrive at the same conclusion after a week of evidence.
“Institutions such as the Indian residential schools were a concrete manifestation of Canada’s colonial policies, expressed in the Indian Act, of elimination of Indigeneity,” Webber said, “including denial of Indigenous sovereignty and nationhood, occupation of Indigenous lands, and the erasure of Indigenous legal orders, languages and cultures.
“The atrocities visited on the bodies and spirits of children in the schools, on young women in hospitals, the thousands of known deaths of children in segregated hospitals, in schools, the unmarked graves, the uninvestigated ashes of babies in furnaces, are the physical manifestations of a genocidal colonialism which, above all, coveted, valued and seized Indigenous lands, territories and resources.”
Webber added there was equally no difficulty in finding that Canada committed crimes against humanity.
“Enforced disappearances, torture, sexual violence, enslavement, persecution and other inhumane omissions, such as failure to provide safe and healthy living conditions, systematically applied to Indigenous children, women and families, constituted crimes against humanity, according to international law,” she said.
Co-chair Valmaine Toki, a Māori barrister from New Zealand, said she found it shocking that the Canadian state appeared “indifferent to the exposure of its crimes.”
Toki noted that while the Canadian federal government established the TRC and the Office of the Special Interlocutor, it denied those bodies the powers to compel witnesses or subpoena documents, preventing each from carrying out full investigations.
“Canada has ignored most calls for action or has done just enough to be able to say ‘We’re working with Indigenous communities,’” Toki said. “All the survivors, witnesses and experts stressed Canada’s lack of genuine engagement, sense of urgency or even interest in remedying the violation.”
Toki described the Canadian state’s responsibility toward Indigenous people in response to what she called genocide and crimes against humanity as “not only historic, but also contemporary and continuing.”
“In international law,” she said, “state responsibility for violation continues until they stop and are relieved.”
Toki closed her part of the preliminary statement by surveying the enormous difficulties faced by those seeking to reveal expanded truths about the residential school system, at the same time as some Indigenous burial sites have been developed for private use.
The last of the judges to speak was Canadian-American lawyer Seánna Howard, who called for a variety of remedies from Canada. These began with the demand to implement the recommendations and calls to action from all inquiries dating back to the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, and to respect the self-determination of Indigenous nations and engage with them on a nation-to-nation basis consistent with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Howard also called for Canada to support Indigenous families, communities and nations in efforts to identify and locate missing and disappeared children, and to condemn and combat residential school denialism and hate speech.
The full report by the 57th Permanent People’s Tribunal is due in September.
