South Africa went to The Hague to make international law travel. It travelled. On 20 August it arrived back in Pretoria, carried by a Southern African movement asking for a reasoned South African answer.

Disclosure: I advise the Mthwakazi Republic Party, Office of the President, on recognition doctrine and sovereignty. I am also a doctoral candidate in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Both interests are recorded here plainly.

On 20 August the Mthwakazi Republic Party submitted a formal consolidated submission to the South African Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on International Relations and Cooperation. It bears the Party’s own reference, MRP/SA-IL/2026/01, and names the Committee Chairperson and Secretary.[6]

It does not ask Parliament to recognize an independent Mthwakazi. It says so at the outset and repeats that limitation throughout.

It asks South Africa to explain South Africa.

The submission collects Pretoria’s own written statements to the International Court of Justice, its own Constitution, its own position on Somaliland, its own treatment of Western Sahara, and the African Union’s own inherited-border doctrine. It sets them side by side. Then it asks for the legal test that produces those different results.

That is the law of unintended consequences operating at the level of a state’s foreign policy. South Africa spent years building universal arguments at The Hague — in Chagos, in the Palestine advisory proceedings, and then in its contentious case against Israel. The consequence is that the language of those pleadings can now be carried home.

First, the finding that does not exist

One matter should be settled before anything else, because it has been obscured by nearly three years of political argument.

There is no judgment of the International Court of Justice finding that Israel committed genocide in Gaza.

South Africa instituted proceedings under the Genocide Convention in December 2023. The Court issued orders on provisional measures. It has made no determination on the merits, and the case remains pending. Provisional measures are not a verdict. An allegation is not a finding.

The point is not a technicality, and it does not rest on my characterization. Joan Donoghue, who presided over the Court when the January 2024 Order was delivered and who read that Order aloud, said afterwards that the Court did not decide that the claim of genocide was plausible. What the Court found plausible were the rights asserted — the right of Palestinians to be protected from genocidal acts — which is a different proposition entirely. She described the confusion between the two as a widespread misreading.[1]

That is the present procedural position.

What follows is opinion, and I mark it as such. As someone who has spent four decades on the documentary record of one genocide and who studies the field formally, on the public record presently available I do not believe the Convention’s specific-intent threshold — the intent to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such — has been established. Others disagree. The Court will decide, in its own time, and I am content to be judged by that outcome.

But here is what I want to put to Pretoria, and it is the reason this article exists.

The argument that follows does not depend on that opinion being correct. It does not depend on the case being won or lost. Pretoria cannot escape it by prevailing at The Hague.

Pretoria chose the word

The most consequential language in this affair was not written in Bulawayo. It was written by the Republic of South Africa, and filed with the world’s highest court.

In its 2023 written statement in the advisory proceedings on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, South Africa described self-determination not as a Palestinian claim but as a right of “all peoples in the world.” It characterized the right as peremptory, said it bore an erga omnes character, and stated that all States hold a collective legal interest in its realization and protection.[2]

Five years earlier, in the Chagos proceedings, Pretoria had gone further. It called........

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