The Hague Just Blinked: Genocide, Interrupted

When law defers to power, justice becomes selective, and impunity gets codified.

By Sabah Al-Makki

On May 5, 2025, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declined to hear Sudan’s case against the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which accused Abu Dhabi of complicity in the genocide unfolding in Darfur. The case was dismissed not on evidentiary grounds, but based on a decades-old reservation the UAE filed when it joined the Genocide Convention in 2005.
Far from a mere legal technicality, the decision ruptured the moral architecture of international law, exposing how legal institutions increasingly defer to geopolitical power.

From Clause to Cover-Up: How a Reservation Became a Shield for Genocide
On April 30, 2025 — just days before the ruling — Middle East Eye published a prescient legal analysis titled “ICJ urged not to throw Sudan’s UAE genocide case out on a ‘technicality’.” Yonah Diamond, legal advisor at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, warned that upholding the UAE’s reservation to Article IX would set a dangerous precedent. He described the logic as akin to a perpetrator saying: “I promise not to commit genocide, but if I do, you can’t prosecute me.”
Diamond emphasized that turning legal reservations into impunity shields undermines the foundation of the post-WWII international justice system. His view was echoed by jurists like Judge Richard Goldstone, former prosecutors of the Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals, and UN legal advisor Hans Corell — all of whom stressed that the Genocide Convention’s purpose transcends procedural loopholes, especially when crimes are as well-documented as those in Darfur.
Their warning was prophetic.
Sudan presented extensive evidence: Chinese-made drones and artillery shipped via UAE-linked air routes; mass atrocities targeting the Masalit community; survivor testimonies; and investigative reports by Yale and independent genocide monitors. None of it was reviewed. The Court upheld the UAE’s reservation at face value and dismissed the case without entering the merits.
What began as a procedural clause became a political firewall, preemptively insulating a state from accountability, not to protect sovereignty, but to enable impunity.

The Hague’s Double Standards: Belgrade Prosecuted, Abu Dhabi Protected
A glaring contradiction lies at the heart of this case: How did the ICJ treat Serbia’s reservation in the Srebrenica genocide case, and how did it treat the UAE’s in the Darfur case?
In Bosnia v. Serbia (2007), Serbia also filed a reservation on Article IX. But the Court proceeded anyway, citing Serbia’s role as Yugoslavia’s legal successor and its failure to challenge jurisdiction early, interpreting this as tacit acceptance. The Court ruled that Serbia was responsible for failing to prevent genocide.
In Sudan v. UAE (2025), the Court took the opposite approach: it upheld the UAE’s reservation as a prima facie bar to jurisdiction. It dismissed the case from its docket without examining a single piece of evidence.
The result? Accountability for some, impunity for others. Legal reservations — once technical clauses — have morphed into sovereign shields for proxy states, redefining justice as a privilege of power, not a principle of law.

Justice for Sale: The Proxy State Exception
Why did the Court enforce such a blatant double standard?
The answer lies not in legal interpretation but in the invisible architecture of global power, where law bends to wealth, strategic alliances, and transactional utility.
Despite its affluence, the UAE is not a regional power in any sovereign or civilizational sense. It lacks demographic scale, historical continuity, and a coherent national doctrine. It possesses capital — with it, it rents influence, performs outsourced violence, and operates as a proxy agent of global hegemony within the architecture of the international order.
Far from acting autonomously, the UAE is a synthetic extension of Western security architecture. It finances counterrevolutions, destabilizes fragile states, arms militias, and cloaks aggression in the language of “counterterrorism.”
It bankrolls coups and sponsors mercenaries;
It launders legitimacy through sovereign wealth and real estate diplomacy;
It saturates Western think tanks with petrodollar narratives;
It is a premier client in the global arms trade, not to defend sovereignty, but to enforce offshore coercion.
The ICJ’s ruling was not a defense of law but a ritualized concession to a proxy regime performing geopolitical labor for greater powers.
This is not an isolated case. In a rare moment of candor during a May 20, 2024 interview with CNN, ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan revealed that he had been warned — reportedly by U.S. President Joe Biden — not to pursue an indictment against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “This court is built for Africa and for thugs like Putin,” Khan was told. That was no slip — it was doctrine.
It confirmed what the Global South has long known: that international justice is not blind but calibrated. It prosecutes the weak, protects the useful, and erases war crimes with a reservation, a veto, or silence.
The courts adjudicate proximity to empire from Palestine to Sudan, Afghanistan to Myanmar, not principle. And the cost is paid in civilian blood.

The Port Sudan Strike: The Mask Falls
While the ICJ buried the case, the war did not pause. On May 6 — one day after the verdict — Port Sudan, the country’s interim capital, came under renewed drone attack in broad daylight. Fuel depots were incinerated, power was cut, and a hotel near the presidential palace was engulfed in flames.
According to Sudanese intelligence sources, the drones were launched from Bosaso Air Base in Puntland, Somalia, which the UAE has operated since 2017. This base, positioned along the Gulf of Aden, has long served as a forward military outpost for Emirati operations in the Horn of Africa.
This was no rogue militia act; it was a coordinated escalation — a state-directed strike with the UAE at the center of the chain of command and shielded by Western impunity.
For two years, Sudanese civilians have endured a proxy war shaped not merely by internal divisions but by the machinery of externally engineered warfare, with the UAE playing a central role militarily, financially, and diplomatically.
Port Sudan marked the inflection point, where the euphemism of “regional partner” collapsed into the reality of soft colonialism, executed by drone and obscured by diplomacy.
In response, Sudan formally severed diplomatic ties with the UAE, declared it a state of aggression, and invoked Article 51 of the UN Charter, identifying the strike as a direct threat to national sovereignty and Red Sea security.
Justice Reimagined: From Courtroom to Conscience
The ICJ may have declined to hear Sudan’s case, but it has not silenced the charge—it has merely displaced it. When law retreats, justice must be pursued elsewhere: in history, political will, and collective memory.
The case continues — not in The Hague, but in the testimonies of survivors, in the archives of documentation, and in the moral imagination of a people denied recourse. For too long, the Sudanese voice has been muffled by diplomatic pretense; now, it reverberates across civil society, regional platforms, and global conscience.
When institutions capitulate, justice must be rebuilt — not through courts alone, but through truth-telling, civic mobilization, and the ethical clarity of those left unprotected by power.
What is at stake is no longer merely Sudan’s territorial integrity — it is the credibility of the international order itself.
The Hague has issued its ruling.
But history has not rendered its judgment.
And Sudan has not yet spoken its final word.