Israel’s new judge in ICJ case is a law professor who blasted UN court as manipulative

Israel has decided to appoint Prof. Ron Shapira as Israel’s ad hoc judge in South Africa’s International Court of Justice case, accusing the country of genocide in Gaza, a spokesperson for the Prime Minister’s Office tells The Times of Israel.

Shapira will replace former chief justice Aharon Barak, who had been a member of the 15-judge panel at the top UN court until he stepped down last month, citing “personal family reasons.”

Shapira, an attorney, is the rector of the Peres Academic Center in Rehovot and a lecturer on law at Bar-Ilan University and Tel Aviv University, though his judicial credentials are nowhere near those of Barak.

In January, when Barak was announced as the judge, Shapira wrote on Facebook that the former Supreme Court chief was being sent to “a body that almost all residents of Israel think is unworthy of any level of trust.

“The consensus in Israel is that this entity embodies and takes to the extreme all the flaws of legal discourse in existence: intellectual dishonesty, manipulative use of ambiguous definitions, overly cumbersome tools for fact-checking and lie-debunking, and concealment of ulterior motives of the judges themselves via wording that falsely poses as neutral,” he wrote.

While expressing respect for Barak, Shapira concluded that post by stressing that sending such an esteemed legal expert “does not stem from respect we have for such decision-making.”