On April 25, 2024, Jane Donoghue, who was President of the International Court of Justice in January, when it was reported that the Court had found there was a plausible case for Israel to answer for alleged violation of the Genocide Convention, was interviewed on BBC Hardtalk.

In this Hardtalk interview, Donoghue walks back that common belief that it had decided there was a plausible case against Israel of committing genocide:

Q. Would it be fair to say and I’m no lawyer, and many people watching and listening will not be lawyers, but would it be fair to say that the key point that you made your initial order and ruling upon was whether or not there was a plausible case that should be taken on by the court of genocide in the case of Israel’s actions in Gaza after October 7th, and you quite clearly decided that there was a plausible case. Is it right to say that that was what you decided?

A. You know, I’m glad I have a chance to address that because the court test for deciding whether to impose measures uses the idea of plausibility, but the test is the plausibility of the rights that are asserted by the applicant, in this case South Africa. So the court decided that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide, and that South Africa had the right to present that claim in the court. It then looked at the facts as well, but it did not decide, and this is something where I’m correcting what’s often said in the media, it didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible. It did, it did emphasize in the order that there was a risk of irreparable harm to the Palestinian right to be protected form genocide, but it — the shorthand that often appears which is that there’s a plausible case of genocide isn’t what the court decided.

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