Exploring the role of the International Court of Justice in human rights.
Depending on the angle from which you view it, the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice can embody either the promises or the failures of one of the primary aims of the international human rights project: making rights a matter of law, not just of power.
Last week, the court, which is the United Nations’ top judicial body, heard initial arguments in the case brought by South Africa in late December, which accuses Israel of “acts and omissions” that are “genocidal in character” against Palestinians in Gaza.
This is only the fourth time that a country has brought a genocide case before the I.C.J. The first was in 1993, 44 years after the Convention was drafted in 1948. And the other three have been filed in just the last four years: a 2019 case against Myanmar alleging genocide against the Rohingya minority; a 2022 case alleging Russia had abused the Genocide Convention as a pretext for an illegal invasion of Ukraine, and that Russia appeared to be planning acts of genocide in Ukraine; and the current case against Israel.
Israel categorically denies the accusation, and the 17 judges sitting in this case are now deliberating whether to order “provisional measures,” a temporary order that would ask Israel to take proactive steps to ensure genocide doesn’t occur in the future, while the case is pending.
The case has understandably aroused extremely strong emotions. I am not going to analyze South Africa’s allegations or Israel’s counterarguments here. Rather, I want to explore what the case tells us about how the I.C.J. functions and the role it plays in human rights overall, not only in this case, but in others, too.
On the one hand, we see a system in which countries can be called before a neutral tribunal to account for their actions.
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