Ugandan judge Julia Sebutinde has been elected as the Vice-President of the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Sebutinde replaces Kirill Goratsiyevich Gevorgian in the top seat where she will serve for a term of three years. The Court will be led by Lebanese Nawaf Salam as president.
Judge Sebutinde has been a Member of the Court since February 6, 2012, when she became the first African woman to serve on the ICJ. Before joining the Court, she was a judge at the Special Court for Sierra Leone from 2005 to 2011.
Her election to the top position comes a few weeks after she dominated news headlines for being the only judge on the panel of 17 judges to vote against all the provisional measures sought by South Africa in its genocide case against Israel. Her ruling attracted mixed reactions.
Who is Judge Sebutinde?
Born in February 1954, Sebutinde is a Ugandan judge serving her second term at the ICJ.
She has been a judge at the court since March 2012. She is the first African woman to sit on the international court.
According to the Institute for African Women in Law, Sebutinde comes from a modest family.
Sebutinde attended Lake Victoria Primary School in Entebbe. After finishing primary school, she went to Gayaza High School. She later pursued her degree at Makerere University and received a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1977, at the age of 23.
Later, as part of her education in 1990, at the age of 36, she went to Scotland where she earned a Master of Laws degree with distinction from the University of Edinburgh. In 2009, the same university honoured her with a Doctorate of Law, recognizing her contributions to legal and judicial service.
Before being elected to the ICJ, Sebutinde was a judge of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. She was appointed to that position in 2007.
Fast forward to 2024, Sebutinde captured headlines, this time for being the only judge who voted against all measures sought by South Africa in its genocide case against Israel.
In a dissenting opinion, Sebutinde stated, “In my respectful dissenting opinion, the dispute between the State of Israel and the people of Palestine is essentially and historically a political one.” “It is not a legal dispute susceptible to judicial settlement by the Court,” she added. She also said that South Africa didn’t demonstrate that the acts allegedly committed by Israel were “committed with the necessary genocidal intent and that as a result, they are capable of falling within the scope of the Genocide Convention.”
