The International Court of Justice is a bad joke.

Eric Zuesse

The International Court of Justice is the supreme court of the United Nations, but it is a mockery of law and of justice, because no matter how badly a Judge argues his/her opinion, and even if no evidence is cited in that opinion to back that opinion up, the judge cannot be removed. The judge cannot be removed even if the judge issues such an opinion on a case in which that judge is manifestly self-interested — there isn’t even, in the U.N.’s enabling Statute of the International Court of Justice, any provision regarding the conditions under which a judge must recuse him/herself from participating in a particular case — not even if the judge is openly on record as supporting a belief that materially impinges against that judge's being impartial in that particular case — so, there is no requirement, at all, that a judge on this Court MUST be impartial. A court which allows prejudice, instead of the facts, and laws and legal precedents, to determine a judge’s opinion, is a mere mockery of justice — it is beneath contempt. And, so, today, is the International Court of Justice.

A specific instance of all of these failings in the ICJ is Judge Sebutinde, who is committed to a fundamentalist Christian sect, meaning one that requires acceptance of the Bible as being The Word of God and a book of history instead of myth, a 100% truthful account, inerrant, no mixture of facts and lies. (That sect, the Watoto Church, led Uganda to make homosexuality a capital offense in her country. Its pastor and founder preaches that the preservation of Israel as the Jewish state is essential in order for Christians to go to heaven instead of to hell.) She has ruled on cases concerning Israel in which she has cited no evidence at all, but in which her opinions are consistent with this personal religious conviction that she has, which may — since she provides no evidence for her opinion — reasonably therefore be presumed to reflect her belief in the Bible, instead of to reflect the particulars of the case at hand. This is, in fact, substituting biblical law for international law. Should it be allowed for a jurist on the ICJ to do that?

Article 18 of the Statute of the ICJ asserts that “No member of the Court can be dismissed unless, in the unanimous opinion of the other members, he has ceased to fulfill the required conditions.” No reason is needed — merely the unanimous desire of all of her colleagues to get rid of that judge. Furthermore, if she has even one other judge who wants her to stay as being a member of the Court, then there is no way to remove her, regardless of how bad or incompetent she is. All that she needs is one friend on the Court.

On 26 January 2024, the ICJ issued its most historic ruling yet, in the case of South Africa’s accusation of genocide against Israel regarding Israel’s war against the Gazans.  Judge Sebutinde issued dissenting opinions on all 16 counts. Her dissenting opinions on that case (html here, and pdf here) were made public on May 24th. She wrote there:

Once again, South Africa has invited the Court to micromanage the conduct of hostilities between Israel and Hamas. Such hostilities are exclusively governed by the laws of war (international humanitarian law) and international human rights law, areas where the Court lacks jurisdiction in this case. Regrettably, the wording of the Court’s directive in operative clause 57, paragraph (2) (a), ordering Israel to “halt its military offensive . . . in the Rafah Governorate”, is susceptible to ambiguity and could be misunderstood or misconstrued as ordering an indefinite, unilateral ceasefire, thereby exemplifying an untenable overreach on the part of the Court. In my understanding, the objective of the Court is to order Israel to suspend its military offensive in Rafah only in so far as such suspension is necessary to prevent the bringing about of conditions of life that could bring about the destruction of the Palestinians in Gaza. In my view, a suspension of Israel’s military offensive in Rafah, whether temporary or indefinite, has no link to South Africa’s plausible rights or Israel’s obligations under the Genocide Convention, as required by Article 41 of the Statute of the Court and its associated jurisprudence. This directive, which could be erroneously misunderstood as mandating a unilateral ceasefire in part of Gaza, amounts to micromanaging the hostilities in Gaza by restricting Israel’s ability to pursue its legitimate military objectives, while leaving its enemies, including Hamas, free to attack without Israel being able to respond. This measure also implicitly orders Israel to disregard the safety and security of the over 100 hostages still held by Hamas, a terrorist organization that has refused to release them unconditionally. I firmly believe that Israel has the right to defend itself against its enemies, including Hamas.

Obviously, she thinks that the October 7th event (2023), which killed approximately 1,200 Israelis, justifies Israel’s ethnic cleansing or else genocide against the 2.3 million Gazans as constituting “self defense” by Israel (and therefore acceptable under Article 51 of the U.N.’s Charter). However, in Hitler’s regime, that same unlimited right of revenge was being routinely applied against that Government’s enemies; and Sebutinde provides us with nothing to distinguish between Germany then and Israel now; and, so, by extension from her opinions on this case, the leaders of Germany’s nazism also didn’t commit war-crimes — and this line of thinking (disallowing and negating what the Nuremberg Tribunal had allegedly been set up to do, regardless of whether it even did achieve that) is acceptable for a judge on the world’s highest Court today. 

Her opinion does assert as relevant facts the PR actions by Israel’s Government assisting humanitarian aide to Gazans, but ignores such overriding facts as that Israel’s instructions to Gazans, to evacuate areas which are to be bombed, and to order them to relocate themselves to “safe” areas, have routinely been promptly followed by Israel’s then bombing both areas. So: even the facts that she cites are only PR facts, not any actual evidence that Israel is NOT committing an ethnic cleansing or even genocide against Gazans. 

On 26 January 2024, AlJazeera headlined “ICJ updates: Court orders Israel to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza”, and reported:

Recap: The measures ICJ ordered Israel to take

These are the provisional measures that Israel must take immediately, as outlined earlier by ICJ President Joan Donoghue:

By 15 votes to 2, the State of Israel shall, in accordance with its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in relation to the Palestinians in Gaza, take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of the Article 2 of the Convention, in particular, A) killing members of the group, B) causing serious bodily or mental harm to the members of the group, C) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and D) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

By 15 votes to 2, the State of Israel shall ensure, with immediate effect, that its military does not commit any acts described in point 1 above.

By 16 votes to 1, the State of Israel shall take all measures within its power to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip.

By 16 votes to 1, the State of Israel shall take immediate and effective measures to ensure the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

By 15 votes to 2, the State of Israel shall take effective measures to prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations of acts within the scope of Article 2 and Article 3 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide against members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip.

By 15 votes to 2, the State of Israel shall submit a report to the court on all measures taken to give effect to this order within one month as from the date of the order.

Sebutinde’s opinion was the “1” when there was 1 dissent, and was in the “2” when there were 2 dissents. The other judge when there were 2, was the Israeli judge on the Court. So, she was even more extreme in defense of Israel than Israel’s judge was. (Of course, BOTH of them ought to have been disqualified from participating in this case.) Her opinion even closed with: “Regrettably, as a result of the exceptionally abbreviated time-frame for the hearings, Israel could not be represented by its chosen Counsel, who were unavailable on the dates scheduled by the Court. It is also regrettable that Israel was required to respond to a question posed by a Member of the Court over the Jewish Sabbath.” She assumed that the world’s highest Court, and the only Court that is part of the U.N., ought to wait until an ethnic cleansing or genocide is completed, before taking any action against it, and ought to accommodate the holidays of an accused’s religion when setting its own calendar on the case against the accused, and also to accommodate the defendant’s preferred legal counsels’ existing availabilities. Why not let the defendants take over the entire management of this Court?

Here are some of the biblical passages that were cited in South Africa’s 84-page case against Israel (see especially pages 59-67, “Expressions of Genocidal Intent against the Palestinian People by Israeli State Officials and Others” — the case’s core, which has been hidden from the public by the press including the search-engines) and documented there as having been cited by Israel’s accused leaders as constituting ‘justification’ to exterminate all Gazans:

Deuteronomy 7:1-2: The Lord your God will bring you unto the land that you are going to occupy, and He will drive many nations out of it. As you advance, He will drive out seven nations larger and more powerful than you: the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzicites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. When the Lord your God places these people iin your power and you defeat them, you must put them all to death. Show them no mercy.

1 Samuel 15:3: Now go and smite the Amalekites, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not, but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

Joshua 11:6-12: But the Lord said to Joshua, “Do not be afraid because of them, for tomorrow about this time I will deliver all of them slain before Israel. You shall hamstring their horses and burn their chariots with fire.” So Joshua and all the people of war with him came against them suddenly by the waters of Merom, and they attacked them. ... Joshua did to them as the Lord had told him: ... There was none left breathing. ...  He utterly destroyed them, as Moses the servant of the Lord had commanded.

In light of such ‘evidence’ (which Sebutinde accepts as being history-not-myth but of course did not cite), her opinions on that case made sense. (After all: if God commanded genocide against what now are called “Palestinians,” then it is God’s law, no mere Man’s law — and anything but the U.N.’s law. Of course, she can’t say that publicly. And, of course, she won’t.) But is this the type of International Court of Justice that the world ought to accept? Is a person such as that suitable to rule on a case such as this? Fortunately, there were no OTHER judges on this case who were so bad. But quite evidently, there is no protection that judges like that won’t some day come to constitute that Court’s majority. The real problem is much deeper: it is the ICJ itself.

On 6 February 2024, the ICJ headlined “Judge Julia Sebutinde elected Vice-President of the International Court of Justice” and announced that, “Judge Julia Sebutinde (Uganda) was today elected Vice-President of the International Court of Justice by her peers, for a term of three years. Vice-President Sebutinde has been a Member of the Court since 6 February 2012.” Clearly, despite all of the facts that are stated here, she is highly regarded by her colleagues on the Court.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.Thanks for reading Eric’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.