On 14 January, the Ugandan judge Julia Sebutinde, a devout Christian Zionist accused of plagiarising pro-Israeli sources to defend the occupation of Palestine, was appointed acting president of the international court of justice (ICJ) in The Hague. The only justice to oppose all six provisional measures the court issued last year in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, Sebutinde’s record raises serious concerns about impartiality amid efforts to hold Israel accountable for its grave violations of international law.

Sebutinde’s appointment comes at a decisive moment for the global legal order, as UN experts warn that states’ widespread failure to uphold their legal obligations towards Israel threatens the very foundation of international law.

Novara Media spoke to legal experts about what Sebutinde’s appointment means.

The deciding vote.

The first African woman to sit on the ICJ, Sebutinde was appointed as the court’s acting president after Nawaf Salam left the role in January 2025 to become prime minister of Lebanon. As vice-president at the time, Sebutinde automatically assumed the responsibilities of the presidency.

The president of the ICJ holds a variety of procedural powers that could allow them to influence the genocide case in favour of Israel, should they decide to.

If judges cannot reach a majority decision in deliberations – including final judgments and provisional measures – the president casts the deciding vote. And even if the court rules that genocide has been committed in the Gaza Strip, the president can still influence the wording of the final judgment in ways that limit the ruling’s impact.

If they choose, the president can appoint the drafting committee of the final judgment. They will also preside over final revisions to the text. In this process, the president could dilute the ruling’s wording and narrow its scope to shield Israel from more severe legal consequences and enforcement measures. This could allow the court to acknowledge genocide whilst setting an extremely high threshold for proving that Israel is directly responsible. However, this is a worst-case scenario.

The president can, however, steer cases in more understated ways.

Jeff Handmaker is associate professor of legal sociology at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. “Given the subtleties in how the ICJ conducts its work,” he told Novara Media, “it is not difficult to imagine how Sebutinde’s evident bias in favour of Israel would influence her by administering the trial in a manner favourable to Israel.”

“This soft power she would hold could manifest, for example, in: the limiting or extending of speaking times allocated during court sessions, deadlines imposed for filing of pleadings, the ability to make corrections to a legal filing, the furnishing of copies to the respective state parties or drawing on experts and witnesses.”

It is possible that Sebutinde may serve the remainder of Salam’s term, which is due to last until February 2027. If she does, she will oversee the crucial period in South Africa’s genocide case: Israel is set to present its defence brief by July 2025, and whilst the court has not yet specified an exact date for the final judgment, it will probably fall within the current presidential term.

Handmaker suspects, however, that the ICJ is unlikely to leave Sebutinde in the role that long. “It is more likely that, in order to preserve the integrity of the court’s independence and impartiality in the eyes of the international law community and the general public, a fresh election will be held,” he said.

Yet even if Sebutinde’s term is short, she could influence the court’s business significantly. Given her judicial record, which has consistently reflected her deeply held Christian Zionist beliefs, this has already generated deep concern among those advocating for Palestinian liberation.

‘Extreme views.’

Sebutinde is a member of the Watoto church, a Pentecostal Christian community based in the Ugandan capital of Kampala and founded by Pastor Gary Skinner, a dedicated Christian Zionist. Skinner trumpets an impending “end times” – a series of events culminating in the second coming of Christ, including the return of the Jews to Israel.

Sebutinde has explicitly acknowledged the influence of the Watoto community on her worldview and her legal practice: “Godly values of integrity, honesty, justice, mercy, empathy, and hard work that the Skinners and Watoto church instilled and nurtured in me over the years account for who I am today, and have immensely contributed to my incredible career as a judge in Uganda and a judge at the International Court of Justice.”

Whilst judges inevitably hold views based on cultural and religious influences, Handmaker warns that “the extreme religious and ideological views of Sebutinde, which include extensive biblical references in her dissenting judgements, align closely with the standpoint of the Israeli government, rather than emanating from her professional role as a senior judge and president of the ICJ.”

Judge Sebutinde declined Novara Media’s request for comment.

Standing with Israel.

In January 2024, the ICJ issued six provisional measures to Israel, including orders to prevent genocide in Gaza and allow humanitarian assistance into the Strip. The measures received near-unanimous backing from the 17-judge panel – even Israeli judge Aharon Barak supported two of the six measures.

But one judge voted against every single measure: Sebutinde. So extreme was her opposition to the provisional measures that Uganda’s ambassador to the UN, Adonia Ayebare, publicly distanced the Ugandan government from Sebutinde.

In her dissenting opinion against the ICJ majority, where she was obliged to provide a full and conscientious legal justification for her decision, Sebutinde largely disregarded South Africa’s extensive legal arguments.

Sebutinde argued that there were “no indicators of a genocidal intent” by Israel and that “the controversy or dispute between the state of Israel and the people of Palestine is essentially and historically a political or territorial (and, I dare say, ideological) one … not a legal one calling for judicial settlement.’”

Six months later, in her dissenting opinion against the ICJ’s landmark advisory opinion that found that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank violates international law, Sebutinde went further. She cast doubt on the existence of Palestine as a distinct historical territory, claiming that the name “Palestine” only “applied vaguely to a region that for the 400 years before World War I was part of the Ottoman Empire.” Sebutinde then reproduced Zionist narratives of the biblical “bond” of the Jewish people to ancient Israel, citing the Old Testament to trace this “from prehistory to the end of Ottoman rule.”

Shahd Hammouri, senior legal consultant at Law for Palestine and lecturer in law at the University of Kent, rejects Sebutinde’s reasoning. She told Novara Media: “There’s nothing in international law that says that you get to claim land on the premises of how you interpret religion – otherwise I could start a religion tomorrow morning and claim the United States as spiritually my land.”

Plagiarising Zionists?

Yet Sebutinde’s written judgments do more than reflect the influence of her Christian Zionist beliefs. They appear to have been partly plagiarised from pro-Israeli sources. Historian of Palestine Zachary Foster has alleged that significant sections of Sebutinde’s dissenting opinion against the ICJ’s advisory opinion on Israel’s West Bank occupation were lifted from pro-Israel commentators and advocacy groups.

In her account of the “historical nuances” of the Israeli occupation, Sebutinde appears to have copied several sentences from an opinion piece written by US neoconservative Douglas J Feith, an avowed Zionist and a former under-secretary of defense, often referred to as the architect of the Iraq war. Sebutinde then seems to lift four sentences nearly word-for-word from a page of the Jewish Virtual Library, an online encyclopedia published by the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, a non-profit organisation created to “strengthen the US-Israeli relationship”.

Later in the opinion, when discussing the failures of a two-state solution, Sebutinde repeats several sentences almost verbatim from a video produced by PragerU, a rightwing media outlet whose CEO, Marissa Streit, previously served in the Israeli military intelligence unit 8200. The video’s narrator, David Brog, is the executive director of the Maccabee Task Force, a group dedicated to resisting the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement on North American campuses, and the director of Christians United for Israel.

“While some mis-referencing may occur within a court’s judgement,” said Handmaker, “it is blatantly unacceptable for anyone, let alone a judge of such a high stature, to appropriate others’ ideas and arguments in such a casual and fraudulent manner.

“These allegations question whether she acted to the high ethical standards expected of a judge, and especially a judge-president.”

‘The global south is one one place, the global north is in another.’

Concerns over Sebutinde’s suitability as ICJ President come at a decisive moment for the international legal order. UN experts have warned that the widespread failure of states to comply with the ICJ’s Opinion on the occupation of Palestine ‘jeopardises the entire edifice of international law and rule of law in world affairs.’

According to Hammouri, “International law as we know it today is already under fire for its Eurocentricity and for reaching points of absurdity in relation to Palestine. The politics of this case are very clear: the global south is one one place, the global north is in another.”

The ICJ “is an institution that the global south generally looks at with hope,” Hammouri explained, “but if the court opts for a position that doesn’t tell it like it is, it ends up losing legitimacy in their eyes.”

On the other hand, Hammouri said, if the ICJ rules that Israel’s actions amount to genocide, it would both reaffirm its legitimacy and expose the moral failure of the global north.

“It would signal that the global north has lost the moment where it could claim humanity. And that’s the most important thing about this case – it would illuminate, in their own words and within their own institutions, the brutality and violence of the imperial system under which we live.”