Prof. who called ICJ ‘unworthy of any trust’ tapped as Israel’s judge in genocide case
Ron Shapira, who will replace Aharon Barak as Israel’s ad hoc judge, has said The Hague-based court ’embodies and takes to the extreme all the flaws of legal discourse’
Israel has decided to appoint Prof. Ron Shapira as its 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 told The Times of Israel on Monday. A formal announcement has not yet been made.
Shapira will replace former Supreme Court 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 do not compare to those of the renowned jurist Barak, who is also a former attorney general.
Along with his teaching posts, Shapira is listed as a member of the advisory board at the Israel Law & Liberty Forum, and according to the Haaretz daily has previously been considered by the current right-wing government as a potential Supreme Court candidate.
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 at the time.
While expressing respect for Barak, Shapira concluded that post by stressing that sending such an esteemed legal expert “does not stem from the respect we have for such decision-making.”
Under the ICJ’s rules, a state that does not have a judge of its nationality already on the bench can choose an ad hoc judge to sit in its case.
In the five months he served as an ad hoc judge, Barak voiced dissenting opinions on the panel in four rulings the court made against Israel amid the ongoing war against Palestinian terror group Hamas.
Before Shapira was named, it was not clear who Israel might appoint to replace Barak and, according to the Kan public broadcaster, officials considered not filling his post as no other potential Israeli representative was thought able to influence the other judges.
Among the other names that were raised as possible replacements was former justice and attorney general Elyakim Rubenstein, who served as vice president of the Supreme Court.
South Africa has made four appeals to the ICJ since December accusing Israel of genocide and requesting the court issue orders for Israel to stop its war with Hamas in Gaza.
So far, the court has refrained from doing so but has instructed the country to do everything in its power to reduce civilian casualties and to constrain its operations in Rafah.
The war in Gaza broke out on October 7 with Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel in which terrorists murdered some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 hostages.
In response, Israel launched a military campaign in the Gaza Strip with the proclaimed objectives of dismantling Hamas and getting the hostages back.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 37,500 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 15,000 combatants in battle and some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 attack.
319 troops have been killed during the ground offensive against Hamas and amid operations along the Gaza border. The toll includes a police officer killed in a hostage rescue mission. A civilian Defense Ministry contractor has also been killed in the Strip.
Agencies contributed to this report.
