It is a vast park where plants with thorns are banned… Except for the 2,500 rose bushes that Mark van IJzendoorn, the gardener of the Peace Palace in The Hague (Netherlands), planted in the fall. “Roses are the exception, he said, it is the symbol of love. » At the beginning of February, an icy wind blows in gusts in this enclosure which houses the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest court of the United Nations. With his cap screwed on his head, the Dutchman invites “come back to spring”time for the roses to adjust their petals. Likewise, the peaceful resolution of world conflicts requires constancy of a gardener.
Born in the final hours of the Second World War, the ICJ does not seek to punish, but to resolve. “Faced with the barbarity of wars, it was a question of building a humanitarian civilization based on law”, recalls Somali judge Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf, who receives in his office overlooking the garden. Borders, territorial waters, diplomatic immunities, armed conflicts: for seventy-six years, at least one hundred and twenty of the 193 member states of the UN have come to confront each other, brandishing the weapons of international law. The judges ruled in around 100 cases. They also delivered around thirty advisory opinions at the request of the United Nations. States emerge victorious or defeated, but never humiliated by a procedure to which they have, in one way or another, consented.
On the judges’ desk, the files are piling up. Linked to the burning news, there is the ongoing case of South Africa against Israel and on which the Court already considered, in January, that the Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip, launched after the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, created a “plausible risk of genocide” Palestinians. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, kyiv has increased procedures against Moscow. In the wake of the conflict opposing them in Nagorno-Karabakh, in September 2021, Armenia and Azerbaijan attacked and counterattacked through complaints filed. In 2019, Gambia defeated Burma of “put an end to atrocities and genocide against its own Rohingya people”. The ICJ, also known as the “World Court,” has yet to rule on the Canada-Netherlands v. Syria case. The latter, accused of acts of torture, having boycotted the hearings in the fall of 2023…
Final judgments, not always executed
“The Court reflects geopolitical dynamics, notes Laurence Boisson de Chazournes, professor of international law and Franco-Swiss lawyer. The blocking of political institutions At New York [Conseil de sécurité et Assemblée générale de l’ONU] leads States to look for other spaces. » Especially, she adds, that “the International Criminal Court [CPI] didn’t always do its job.”. Created by a treaty in 1998 – and not by the UN – the other Court in The Hague, 3 kilometers from the Peace Palace, is supposed to prosecute and punish the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity. and genocide. But in twenty years of operation, the States have exploited it so much that it is running after its credibility.
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