{"id":47966,"date":"2025-05-07T14:47:25","date_gmt":"2025-05-07T11:47:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/?p=47966"},"modified":"2025-05-07T14:47:25","modified_gmt":"2025-05-07T11:47:25","slug":"the-hague-just-blinked-genocide-interrupted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/07\/the-hague-just-blinked-genocide-interrupted\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hague Just Blinked: Genocide, Interrupted"},"content":{"rendered":"

When law defers to power, justice becomes selective, and impunity gets codified.<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

By Sabah Al-Makki<\/strong><\/p>\n

On May 5, 2025, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declined to hear Sudan\u2019s 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.
\nFar from a mere legal technicality, the decision ruptured the moral architecture of international law, exposing how legal institutions increasingly defer to geopolitical power.<\/p>\n

From Clause to Cover-Up: How a Reservation Became a Shield for Genocide
\nOn April 30, 2025 \u2014 just days before the ruling \u2014 Middle East Eye published a prescient legal analysis titled \u201cICJ urged not to throw Sudan\u2019s UAE genocide case out on a \u2018technicality\u2019.\u201d Yonah Diamond, legal advisor at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, warned that upholding the UAE\u2019s reservation to Article IX would set a dangerous precedent. He described the logic as akin to a perpetrator saying: \u201cI promise not to commit genocide, but if I do, you can\u2019t prosecute me.\u201d
\nDiamond 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 \u2014 all of whom stressed that the Genocide Convention\u2019s purpose transcends procedural loopholes, especially when crimes are as well-documented as those in Darfur.
\nTheir warning was prophetic.
\nSudan 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\u2019s reservation at face value and dismissed the case without entering the merits.
\nWhat began as a procedural clause became a political firewall, preemptively insulating a state from accountability, not to protect sovereignty, but to enable impunity.<\/p>\n

The Hague\u2019s Double Standards: Belgrade Prosecuted, Abu Dhabi Protected
\nA glaring contradiction lies at the heart of this case: How did the ICJ treat Serbia\u2019s reservation in the Srebrenica genocide case, and how did it treat the UAE\u2019s in the Darfur case?
\nIn Bosnia v. Serbia (2007), Serbia also filed a reservation on Article IX. But the Court proceeded anyway, citing Serbia\u2019s role as Yugoslavia\u2019s 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.
\nIn Sudan v. UAE (2025), the Court took the opposite approach: it upheld the UAE\u2019s reservation as a prima facie bar to jurisdiction. It dismissed the case from its docket without examining a single piece of evidence.
\nThe result? Accountability for some, impunity for others. Legal reservations \u2014 once technical clauses \u2014 have morphed into sovereign shields for proxy states, redefining justice as a privilege of power, not a principle of law.<\/p>\n

Justice for Sale: The Proxy State Exception
\nWhy did the Court enforce such a blatant double standard?
\nThe answer lies not in legal interpretation but in the invisible architecture of global power, where law bends to wealth, strategic alliances, and transactional utility.
\nDespite 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 \u2014 with it, it rents influence, performs outsourced violence, and operates as a proxy agent of global hegemony within the architecture of the international order.
\nFar 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 \u201ccounterterrorism.\u201d
\nIt bankrolls coups and sponsors mercenaries;
\nIt launders legitimacy through sovereign wealth and real estate diplomacy;
\nIt saturates Western think tanks with petrodollar narratives;
\nIt is a premier client in the global arms trade, not to defend sovereignty, but to enforce offshore coercion.
\nThe ICJ\u2019s ruling was not a defense of law but a ritualized concession to a proxy regime performing geopolitical labor for greater powers.
\nThis 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 \u2014 reportedly by U.S. President Joe Biden \u2014 not to pursue an indictment against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. \u201cThis court is built for Africa and for thugs like Putin,\u201d Khan was told. That was no slip \u2014 it was doctrine.
\nIt 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.
\nThe courts adjudicate proximity to empire from Palestine to Sudan, Afghanistan to Myanmar, not principle. And the cost is paid in civilian blood.<\/p>\n

The Port Sudan Strike: The Mask Falls
\nWhile the ICJ buried the case, the war did not pause. On May 6 \u2014 one day after the verdict \u2014 Port Sudan, the country\u2019s 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.
\nAccording 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.
\nThis was no rogue militia act; it was a coordinated escalation \u2014 a state-directed strike with the UAE at the center of the chain of command and shielded by Western impunity.
\nFor 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.
\nPort Sudan marked the inflection point, where the euphemism of \u201cregional partner\u201d collapsed into the reality of soft colonialism, executed by drone and obscured by diplomacy.
\nIn 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.
\nJustice Reimagined: From Courtroom to Conscience
\nThe ICJ may have declined to hear Sudan\u2019s case, but it has not silenced the charge\u2014it has merely displaced it. When law retreats, justice must be pursued elsewhere: in history, political will, and collective memory.
\nThe case continues \u2014 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.
\nWhen institutions capitulate, justice must be rebuilt \u2014 not through courts alone, but through truth-telling, civic mobilization, and the ethical clarity of those left unprotected by power.
\nWhat is at stake is no longer merely Sudan\u2019s territorial integrity \u2014 it is the credibility of the international order itself.
\nThe Hague has issued its ruling.
\nBut history has not rendered its judgment.
\nAnd Sudan has not yet spoken its final word.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s 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 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":46578,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47966"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47968,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47966\/revisions\/47968"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}