Over 50 nations presented testimony to the ICJ on the legality of the Israeli occupation, with the majority offering stirring arguments for Israeli accountability and justice for the Palestinians. An Advisory Opinion is expected sometime this summer.
Twenty years after the International Court of Justice issued an Advisory Opinion on Israel’s Separation Wall, the ICJ is now considering the legality of Israel’s 56-year belligerent occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Eighteen years after the ICJ’s 2004 Advisory Opinion on the legality of the separation wall, the ICJ is now weighing in on the legality of the occupation itself.
“Unlike the Wall Advisory Opinion, which focused on a comparatively narrow set of factual and temporal circumstances […] the requested advisory opinion would entail an evaluation of the legality of Israel’s occupation as a whole,” Anna-Christina Schmidl, a staff member with Diakonia, told Mondoweiss.
Such an opinion would focus on “the impact of ‘colonial domination, alien subjugation and foreign occupation’, on the right to self-determination, and thus go to the very heart of the principles upon which the United Nations was founded.”