She is a rare voice of sanity in the proverbial jungle; an honest and ethical judge at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which has been called a ‘kangaroo court’ for the travesties and moral outrages emanating from its halls.
A propaganda organ posing as a world court, the ICJ is the124-member judicial branch of the United Nations based in the Netherlands. Over the past two decades, this world body has issued multiple one-sided “advisory opinions” –with the latest one handed down on July 19—targeting Israel with allegations of genocide.
Appointed in 2020 for a three-year term, and then elected this February as vice president of the ICJ, 70-year-old Julia Sebutinde, a native of Uganda, is the only ICJ judge to vote against all the emergency orders levied at Israel over its war in Gaza.
She fueled her positions each time with well-argued opinions that demonstrate her mastery of the region’s history and of international law.
In terms of solid support for Israel, Sebutinde surpassed even left-wing Israeli judge Aharon Barak who voted in favor of two of the ICJ measures. Barak shamefully cast his vote with 15 other judges for an interim order urging the Israeli government to stop obstructing aid deliveries into Gaza, and requiring Israel to show proof of its compliance with the rules governing the 1948 Genocide Convention.
Sebutinde rejected all of the resolutions, saying they were aimed at an inappropriate goal: having the ICJ “micromanage the Gaza war” which is wrong, she said. This is a political conflict that needs negotiated agreements between the relevant parties, not a courtroom formula imposed by a world body.
The Ugandan judge stated her own position in a 36-page document that refutes the narrative of Israel’s “unlawful occupation.” Her legal opinion also demonstrates a solid grasp of international law that negates Palestinian claims of Israeli crimes against humanity, experts say.
Given the ICJ’s pronounced hostility toward Israel, “it is surprising that a vice president of the High Court– Julia Sebutinde of Uganda – has spoken up courageously and consistently for Israel – in fact, several times this year,” writes The American Thinker.
Advisory opinions by the ICJ are neither enforceable nor have legal consequences. The denunciations by this world body, however, do wield considerable political and diplomatic influence and can embolden Israel’s enemies in multiple ways.
For example, the ICJ calls on U.N. member states to recognize the Israeli presence in disputed territories as illegal and to withdraw aid from the Jewish state. If implemented on a long term basis, this retaliation would severely impact the Israeli economy.
Sebutinde’s rulings drew fire back home in Uganda, where the government in January disavowed her position. Uganda’s permanent representative to the U.N. issued a statement saying Sebutinde’s opinion “did not represent the position of the Ugandan government, which has expressed support for the Palestinian people through its vote at the U.N.”
Attacks against Sebutinde spread across social media. Internationally renowned human rights Professor Matua lawyer led the charge online, exclaiming, “Justice Sebutinde is an embarrassment to Africa and the world. What shame!”
ICJ’s Efforts to Delegitimize Israel Go Back Decades
The ICJ’s 2004 opinion that Israel’s security wall blocking terrorists from entering Yehuda and Shomron during the second intifada “infringed on Palestinian rights,” is but one early example of the ICJ serving as a propaganda mouthpiece for the Palestinian cause.
The institution’s current onslaught against Israel was sparked in December last year when South Africa asked the ICJ to order Israel to immediately stop the “genocidal” war in Gaza.
South Africa asked for a series of legally binding rulings that would compel Israel to not only cease hostilities but to offer reparations and provide for the reconstruction of Gaza.
In court proceedings held in Jan, May and July 2024, the ICJ repeatedly vilified Israel for retaliating against Hamas, and for defending its citizens against a terrorist regime bent on annihilating the Jewish state.
After much debate over whether to legitimize the ICJ kangaroo court and its concocted charges, Israel sent a team to defend itself against the genocide allegations in the ICJ’s January proceedings, with the hope of neutralizing Hamas propaganda.
The ICJ’s perverted rulings however, proved the futility of Israeli efforts. Thereafter, the Netanyahu government declined to participate in the ICJ’s sham court cases.
As the months went by, the world body continued to issue rulings accusing Israel of violating international law by “unlawfully occupying Palestinian lands” and infringing on Palestinian “rights.” From its place in a morally inverted universe, the ICJ demanded that Israel produce proof that it is not committing genocide.
‘In a gross miscarriage of justice that surprised no one, the main judicial body of the United Nations has attacked Jewish self-determination in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria,” the Wall Street Journal wrote regarding the July ruling.
“The ICJ issued an advisory opinion saying that Israel’s ‘occupation’ of the Palestinian Territories violates international law,” the article said, deriding ICJ’s ruling as “little more than a warmed-over presentation of the Palestinian narrative.”
“The ICJ’s opinion is nonbinding but will reinvigorate the Palestinian crusade against Israel and the West. Yet Western leaders seem oblivious and indifferent,” the article noted. “Several judges took issue with the majority opinion, but it was a woman from Uganda—Judge Julia Sebutinde, the court’s vice president and the only full dissenter in the case—who has come out to tell it like it is.”
Rise To Prominence
A relatively obscure figure on the international scene when she first joined the high court, Sebutinde rose to prominence in January 2024 when she rejected all nine of the court’s emergency directives validating South Africa’s allegations about Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.
That was the first time Sebutinde’s support for Israel drew worldwide attention, some of it favorable, much of it harshly critical.
Then in February, she once again rejected the Court’s findings that Israel’s retaliation after the October 7 attacks was motivated by “genocidal intent.” In her 11-page dissenting opinion, she highlighted the enormity of the Hamas massacres and defended Israel’s right to self-defense, a Jerusalem Post article highlighted.
The third time she stood up for Israel was on May 24, after Israeli action in Rafah. In her nine-page opinion, she said: “I firmly believe Israel has the right to defend itself against its enemies, including Hamas, and to continue efforts to rescue its missing hostages.”
In her ICJ dissent, she argued that existing protocols sufficiently addressed humanitarian concerns in Gaza, and cautioned the ICJ against judicial overreach.
Justice Sebutinde emphasized the need to consider the broader context of the conflict, including annihilationist threats to Israel from multiple armed groups. Her opinion stressed that responsibility for Palestinian suffering could not be assigned to Israel, noting Hamas’s actions in intentionally impeding aid delivery.
The most recent dissent by this jurist with a backbone is her response challenging the court’s July 19 ruling that castigated Israel as “unlawful occupiers,” and charged the government with crimes against humanity.
The Ugandan judge’s strongest charge against the court is that the judges invoked international law selectively and inconsistently, which robs the system of integrity. She marveled at how unlawful occupations of Northern Cyprus, Crimea, Western Sahara, and Abkhazia receive no attention from the IRC while the world court focuses on the “occupation” in Israel.
Sebutinde opines that the court failed to take into account Israel’s territorial and sovereignty rights, as well as the extraordinary measures it takes to avoid harm to civilians.
In addition, the ICJ should have declined to offer an advisory opinion, she said. The world body should have left the resolution of the conflict to a negotiating framework that the disputing parties have already agreed on.
Middle East History 101
The judge’s arguments, which read like a primer in Middle East history, rest on well-established historical points of which millions of Arab citizens of the region have been kept ignorant.
First, the Jewish claim to the territory “dates back to the ancient Kingdom of Israel 3,000 years ago,” Sebutinde writes, citing clear archaeological evidence dating back to 1200 Common Era.
In addition, there was a continuous Jewish presence in the region across the centuries, despite various rulers in different periods seizing control, so it is “crucial to recognize that Jews in Israel are not settler colonists,” she argues.
Third, the name Palestine was imposed on ancient Israel by the Roman Empire to try to erase the Jewish sense of identity with the land, the Ugandan judge writes. Lastly, according to historical documents, there were no more than 250,000 Arabs in the region during the 1880s, when Jews started arriving from Europe in large numbers.
Sebutinde also highlights the well-known legal principle that newly formed states should retain the status quo on borders that existed before their independence. The map of the British Mandate – from which the State of Israel was created in 1948 – had no provision for a separate Palestine.
In line with this perspective, Sebutinde made the bold and unpopular affirmation that Israel has sovereignty over “all the disputed areas of Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza, except to the degree that Israel has voluntarily yielded sovereignty since its independence.”
From Balfour Declaration to Gaza Withdrawal
In tracing the background to the present-day conflict, Sebutinde offers a timeline beginning with the 1917 Balfour Declaration. This was a British document that called for a “national home for the Jewish people,” while ensuring the rights of the Arab population.
Two years later, the First Palestinian Arab Congress of 1919 laid the foundations for an Arab national movement.
In 1922, the League of Nations granted permission for Britain to establish the British Mandate of Palestine, part of which, many Jews hoped, would be earmarked for a Jewish homeland.
By 1948, the territory for the Jewish state was reduced to 20% of that originally designated for it. Much of the land went into the creation of what is now Jordan. The Jews accepted this vastly reduced territory for their “national home.”
Foiling this League of Nation’s plan, the Arabs repeatedly – seven times, as Sebutinde notes – rejected the proposal to create two states, one for Jews, the other for Arabs. Since the Arabs have adamantly refused to accept the existence of Israel, all “land for peace” arguments and externally imposed settlements are in vain, the Ugandan judge states.
In addition, given the Palestinian leadership’s incitement of violence, funding of terror groups, and indoctrination of children to hate Israel, it would be suicidal for the Jewish nation to refrain from defensive action.
As to charges of Israeli “occupation” of Arab land, Sebutinde emphasizes what is well-known: Israel withdrew its troops and citizens from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Gaza is controlled by an elected government—Hamas—yet the U.N. considers the territory “occupied.”
For clear security reasons, she explains, “Israel controls Gaza’s borders, airspace, maritime access, and movement of goods and people from the territory.”
“The Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land — not in our eternal capital Jerusalem, not in the land of our ancestors in Judea and Samaria,” Netanyahu said in response to the ICJ’s ruling. “No false decision in The Hague will distort this historical truth, just as the legality of Israeli settlement in all the territories of our homeland cannot be contested.”
Justice Sebutinde, who has her fair share of critics, not to mention self-avowed enemies, is also admired by many for her independence, writes columnist Janet Levy in The American Thinker.
“Her lone voice resounds like a shofar for Eretz Yisroel – at the ICJ and beyond.”
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Calls to Defund the ICC
Both the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that adjudicate disputes between nations, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) which tries individuals for crimes against international law, are located in The Hague, Netherlands.
Both of these institutions are branches of the United Nations; both are driven by political agendas and pro-Arab alignments.
The ICC is now seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on war crime charges, the Jerusalem Post reports. These moves exposed the ICC “as a deeply anti-Semitic institution that ignores facts and jurisdiction in its drive to conduct ‘lawfare’ against democracies that defend themselves against terrorism,” a NY Post op-ed charged.
“American policy should now turn toward pressuring allies to defund this kangaroo court and imposing financial sanctions to grind its operations to a halt,” the op-ed urged.
Lawfare as a Powerful Form of Warfare
The article went on to slam the ICC for its indictment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes.
“These indictments have nothing to do with law and everything to do with lawfare – that is, the use of legal systems to damage or delegitimize an adversary,” the writer said. Enemies of the United States and Israel are using the ICC to attack a democratic nation defending it citizens from a brutal terrorist enemy.
“In effect, the ICC has joined an Iran-led axis as a partner in a war to destroy the one Jewish state – all under cover of international law,” the NY Post op-ed said.
The article goes on to detail how the ICC indictments against Netanyahu and Gallant that claim that Israel has intentionally inflicted genocidal harm on Gazan civilians lack all foundation.
“The evidence clearly refutes these accusations. It also demonstrates “an historic Israeli effort to minimize civilian casualties — with a civilian casualty ratio so low as to be unheard of in modern urban warfare.”
In addition, writes the NY Post, the indictments also are clearly illegitimate as they fall outside the ICC’s jurisdiction. Israel is not a member of the ICC and, as a democracy, it has a robust mechanism for self-investigation and accountability.”
The article points out the public relations ploy in ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan “packaging the Israeli indictments alongside charges against the terrorist leaders of Hamas.”
This is an attempt to look even-handed while creating an obscene moral equivalency between sadistic butchers and democratic governments, the article said.
The article slams the ICC’s double standards, pointing out its glaring inaction against the world’s “most evil regimes.”
“In more than 20 years, this so-called court has taken no action against some of the greatest perpetrators of crimes against humanity on the planet — from China’s Xi Jinping’s genocide in Xinjiang, to Ali Bashar al-Assad’s mass-murder of the Syrian people.”
In the face of this indifference toward evil regimes across the globe, how is it that when the world’s only Jewish state fights back against Nazi-like terrorists that slaughtered Jewish families and took others hostage, the ICC self-righteously places only Israel in its crosshairs?
Today the target is Israel. Tomorrow it might be the United States, the writer said. “Like Israel, the US is not a member of the ICC and is a democracy with a functioning system for self-accountability. And like Israel, Washington faces an active ICC investigation into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.”
Defending Israel from the ICC’s lawfare today will help protect American soldiers and government officials from similar harassment down the road.
