Pretoria went to The Hague to make principles travel against Israel. Its own pleadings explain why those principles do not stop at Israel’s border — or Africa’s.

Disclosure: I advise the Mthwakazi Republic Party, Office of the President, on recognition doctrine and sovereignty.

South Africa’s problem began with a word it chose itself: universal. In its 2023 written statement to the International Court of Justice on Palestine, Pretoria described self-determination not merely as a Palestinian claim but as “a right of all peoples in the world.” A few pages later it called the right peremptory, or jus cogens, said that it had an erga omnes character, and said that all states have a collective legal interest in its realization and protection.[1]

Those sentences were aimed at Israel. Their grammar was not. Once a state tells the world’s highest court that a principle belongs to all peoples, concerns all states and has the character of a peremptory norm, the principle becomes difficult to quarantine to the dispute for which it was deployed.

That was not an isolated flourish. Five years earlier, in the Chagos advisory proceedings, South Africa had already described self-determination as a fundamental human right and a jus cogens right. Its paragraph 60 is even harder to contain: “Without self-determination, decolonization cannot be realized.”[2]

South Africa did not stop there. In the same pleading it said self-determination goes “hand in hand” with territorial integrity, and that impairment of territorial integrity can obstruct a people’s ability to realize self-determination “both internally and externally.” In that advisory proceeding, Pretoria also argued that the presence of political implications, domestic matters or contentious issues did not prevent the Court from exercising its advisory jurisdiction over the legal question before it.[3]

A written pleading is not a judgment. It does not freeze a government’s legal analysis forever, and South Africa remains free to distinguish one case from another. But that freedom is not the same thing as costless escape. Pretoria can narrow its earlier arguments, abandon them, or explain why they produce different results in different places. What it cannot credibly do is erase the fact that these were the propositions it chose to place before the Court.

The mess is not secession. It is the test.

The easiest caricature of this argument is that South Africa somehow created a worldwide legal right for every separatist movement to become a state. It did not. Self-determination is not synonymous with secession, and Pretoria’s own 2023 pleading made the right broader than that. It described self-determination as the capacity of a people to determine its political status, choose its government, govern itself without interference, and pursue its economic, social and cultural development.[4]

That is precisely why the unintended consequence is so large. The vocabulary is portable. A people demanding autonomy can use it. A people demanding meaningful federalism can use it. A population claiming that it never consented to the political unit in which it was enclosed can use it. A movement asking for independence can use it too. None receives an automatic victory. All receive the same preliminary question: what legal test decides whether the right is engaged, who holds it, and what counts as its satisfaction?

Across Africa, that question collides with the continent’s inherited-border settlement. South Africa itself supplied the adverse authority. In paragraph 75 of its Chagos statement, Pretoria argued that,........

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