The Toothless Guardian: How the ICJ Has Failed Global Justice and Democracy

Abstract

The International Court of Justice (ICJ), established as the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, was envisioned as the world’s ultimate arbiter for disputes between states. Yet, decades after its inception, the ICJ stands as a symbolic institution—a court without coercion, a law without teeth, and a justice system that bends quietly beneath the weight of power politics. This paper examines how the ICJ’s structural design, political dependencies, and jurisdictional limitations have transformed it from a beacon of international law into an instrument that, directly or indirectly, perpetuates the dominance of the five permanent members (P5) of the UN Security Council. Through contemporary and historical case analyses, it argues that the ICJ’s democratic deficit and enforcement paralysis render it incapable of delivering impartial justice—particularly when violations are committed by or aligned with veto-holding states.

1. Introduction: The Promise and the Paradox

When the ICJ was created in 1945, it was meant to symbolize a new era of global governance—where disputes between nations would be settled not through war, but through law. Its statutes promised equal access and impartial adjudication for all UN member states.

Yet, the very architecture of the UN that birthed the ICJ also shackled it. The Security Council—the organ responsible for enforcing ICJ judgments—is dominated by five nations (the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France) with permanent veto powers. This structural imbalance ensures that justice can never be universal: it is conditional upon the approval or indifference of the powerful.

The paradox is this: the ICJ was created to ensure equality before law among nations, yet it operates under a parent structure where equality itself is institutionally impossible.

2. Structural Flaws and Democratic Deficit

2.1. The Illusion of Universality

While the ICJ is often referred to as the “World Court,” it only has jurisdiction over cases when states consent to it—either through treaty clauses, declarations, or ad hoc agreements. This means that states most likely to commit violations—especially powerful ones—can simply refuse jurisdiction. The Court, therefore, functions as a voluntary club rather than a compulsory judicial body.

In essence, the ICJ does not represent a democratic rule of law, but rather a consensual aristocracy of states.

2.2. The Veto Trap

The ICJ’s dependency on the UN Security Council for enforcement is its greatest democratic failure. Article 94 of the UN Charter empowers the Security Council to enforce ICJ decisions, but when one of the P5 is the offending state—or its ally—enforcement becomes impossible.

In such cases, justice is effectively vetoed.
This dynamic transforms the ICJ into an advisory organ serving the powerful, rather than a judiciary protecting the weak.

3. Case Studies: When Justice Was Denied

I. Nicaragua v. United States (1986) — The Birth of a Precedent for Impunity
In the mid-1980s, the world witnessed one of the earliest proofs that power could rise above law. Nicaragua, a small country recovering from dictatorship, stood before the world’s highest court to challenge the covert wars waged upon its soil. Verified independent investigations, public records, and open hearings revealed how external powers financed and trained armed groups that mined harbors, sabotaged infrastructure, and violated sovereignty under the banner of freedom.
The International Court of Justice ruled clearly: a powerful nation had violated international law. Yet that clarity dissolved in the air of geopolitics. The verdict was never enforced. The Security Council, the only body with the mandate to compel compliance, remained still. The state responsible simply refused to recognize the court’s authority. What could have been a rebirth of law became a ritual burial of it.
The legacy of Nicaragua’s case is not its victory but its silence — the silence that followed. It demonstrated to future generations that in the hierarchy of civilization, law bows before power. And that lesson has echoed across decades.
II. South Africa v. Israel (2024) — The Court That Spoke, and a World That Looked Away
Four decades later, another small nation stood in the same courtroom. South Africa brought a case that shook the conscience of the world — alleging that Israel’s actions in Gaza risked exterminating a people. The court, in a voice measured but grave, agreed there was a “plausible risk” of genocide and ordered immediate measures: allow aid to flow, protect civilians, cease destruction.
But as in Nicaragua’s time, rulings could not stop missiles. The order existed on paper while the siege continued in reality. Verified public investigations from the ground confirmed that food convoys were blocked, hospitals dismantled, and civilians trapped in zones of annihilation. The court had spoken; the world had looked away.
This case marked not the failure of judges, but the death of enforcement. It showed how moral law without coercive muscle becomes elegy — a song sung for the dead by those who still believe in decency. And in that dissonance, the gap between justice and survival widened once more.
III. The Gambia v. Myanmar (Rohingya) — The Law’s Fragile Protection
A small West African state, acting in the name of humanity, carried the plight of the Rohingya to the same chamber. Publicly funded investigators and rights observers had documented entire villages burned, women violated, and a people pushed into exile. The court acknowledged the urgency, issuing provisional measures to prevent further acts of genocide.
But orders do not restrain those who no longer fear them. Myanmar’s rulers continued policies of exclusion and persecution. Hundreds of thousands remained in camps, and the ashes of the burned villages cooled into the quiet of memory.
Independent field reporters who risked their lives to document the exodus described what the world did not wish to see — an entire people left stateless despite a unanimous global vocabulary of “never again.” Their survival became a footnote in the annals of law. Once more, the truth was clear, yet powerless.
IV. Crimea (2014) — The Annexation That Became Routine
When borders shift by force, the world’s legal foundations tremble. Yet in 2014, when troops entered Crimea and a hasty referendum followed, the world adjusted with disturbing ease. Independent journalists and regional monitors traced the intimidation, the military presence, the erasure of dissent. Yet enforcement was selective, timid, and temporary.
The annexation, condemned by resolution, endured in fact. Sanctions came — measured, reversible, and negotiable — but territory did not return. The public record became a museum of violated principles. Crimea’s story revealed that the modern world can recognize a crime, brand it as such, and still accommodate it as permanent reality.
It became the modern blueprint for de facto annexation — proof that in an era of strategic fatigue, illegality can age into acceptance.
V. Syria (2011–present) — Chemical Silence
The war in Syria unfolded like a wound the world could not close. Independent field reporters and humanitarian doctors preserved samples, footage, and testimonies of chemical attacks — the invisible crimes that choke the living. Multilateral investigations confirmed repeated use of banned agents. The evidence was irrefutable; the paralysis complete.
Vetoes strangled resolutions before they could breathe. Justice became a hostage to geopolitics. Millions fled, hundreds of thousands perished, and the perpetrators remained in office, cloaked in sovereign immunity. The world’s memory of Syria is a testament to how repetition normalizes horror. When crimes occur often enough, they no longer shock — they merely continue.
VI. Yemen (2015–present) — The Price of Strategic Friendship
Yemen’s war was not a sudden blaze but a slow immolation. Publicly funded humanitarian observers chronicled the blockade, famine, and epidemics that followed the bombing campaigns. Schools, hospitals, and weddings turned to rubble. Each report repeated the same words — “possible war crimes,” “likely violations,” “no accountability.”
Why did it persist? Because every bomb traced back to contracts, every jet carried the insignia of an ally too economically entwined to confront. The guardians of law sold arms to the violators of it. Independent investigations showed how supply chains of profit outlasted treaties of peace.
Yemen became the graveyard of moral credibility. It taught civilization that conscience cannot compete with commerce — and that humanitarian principles dissolve when their enforcement threatens the marketplace.
VII. Darfur (2003–2019) — Warrants That Never Bit
When the court of humanity — the International Criminal Court — issued an arrest warrant for a sitting head of state for crimes in Darfur, it seemed the world had turned a corner. The announcement carried the weight of history: no one, not even a president, was above the law.
But years passed. The man traveled abroad, shaking hands, attending summits, embraced by nations who had ratified the very treaty that demanded his arrest. Publicly funded reporters documented each trip, each summit, each unfulfilled obligation. The warrant became a symbol of theatrical justice — solemn declarations followed by nothing.
When Sudan’s leader finally fell, it was not law that unseated him but revolt. The court had waited for politics to do its work. Thus ended another chapter where law arrived late — not as protector, but as archivist.
VIII. Transnational Corporate Crimes — The Invisible Sovereigns
There exists a class of power that no nation can arrest: the multinational corporation. Independent, non-profit investigations across continents have exposed how corporations devastate ecosystems, exploit labor, and funnel resources from poor nations to rich markets. They record polluted rivers, forests burned for profit, and workers stripped of rights across borders.
Yet accountability stops at the border’s edge. International law, designed for states, cannot imprison a corporation. Domestic courts bow to trade agreements; arbitration panels exist to protect investors, not victims. The architecture of modern commerce is an immunity system disguised as progress.
This case is not confined to one country. It is a systemic parable — the rise of entities richer than states, untouchable by the very laws that bind individuals. Civilization’s material advancement thus becomes its moral regression.
IX. Israel and Palestine (1948–2025) — The Mirror of Global Hypocrisy
No case exposes the fracture of human morality like this one. For more than seventy years, one people has lived under occupation while the other has lived under existential fear. Both have suffered, yet the balance of power — military, political, narrative — has remained grotesquely unequal.
Independent humanitarian observers have recorded entire cities flattened, civilians trapped without food or medicine, and a population enduring siege conditions. They have also documented the killing of innocents inside Israel during attacks by armed militants. Yet what persists is asymmetry: one side’s suffering dominates the headlines; the other’s suffering dominates the landscape.
Legal orders exist — advisory opinions, provisional measures, resolutions that demand restraint and protection. But enforcement, once again, is hostage to geopolitics. The powerful shield their allies; the weak bury their children. The pattern is no longer about territory — it is about the normalization of injustice itself.
Palestine became the world’s mirror. Each time the international system failed to protect its civilians, it reflected humanity’s moral disfigurement back at itself.
X. Afghanistan (2021–present) — The Abandonment of Half a Nation
When the foreign armies withdrew and the old regime fell, half the population of Afghanistan — its women — lost their rights overnight. Independent educators, journalists, and aid workers who stayed documented the swift erasure of female presence from schools, offices, and public life. Promises made by the global community turned to whispers.
The world condemned the bans but accepted the regime’s permanence. Sanctions and aid restrictions punished the hungry more than the rulers. The institutions that had preached liberation watched quietly from afar. A generation of girls grew up behind doors, and the word “empowerment” turned hollow.
Afghanistan’s tragedy is not only domestic; it is civilizational. It revealed that even the defenders of rights measure justice by strategic convenience. Once the cameras left, the conscience followed.
XI. Climate and Environmental Catastrophe — The Quietest Crime
Beyond wars and borders lies a slower violence — the destruction of the planet itself. Publicly funded scientists and investigators have shown, with irrefutable data, that humanity’s trajectory of consumption threatens the continuity of life. Nations meet, promise reductions, and return to business as usual. Treaties multiply; emissions rise.
No bombs fall in this war, yet its casualties are infinite: species extinct, children poisoned by air and water, entire communities erased by flood and fire. The law, built for immediate crimes, is too slow for this one. There is no court for the atmosphere, no judge for future generations.
This is the final silence — the silence of those who know and do nothing. It is not ignorance that dooms civilization; it is consent.
The Pattern Beneath All Cases

Across these eleven reflections, one sees the same anatomy of failure.
Each story begins with outrage, proceeds to documentation, reaches a legal declaration — and ends in inertia.
Evidence abounds, enforcement evaporates.
Each time, the world proves that knowledge without will is impotence disguised as civilization.
In the modern age, truth is rarely denied outright. It is acknowledged, archived, and ignored. Public investigations exist, open data exists, the suffering is visible — but the system that should act is engineered to wait. It waits for consensus that never comes, for permission from those it should restrain, for moral courage in an age of strategic fear.
The real verdict from these case studies is not on any single nation but on humanity’s structure of governance. We have built courts that can speak but not compel, institutions that can mourn but not protect, and laws that can name crimes but not stop them. This architecture of impotence survives because it benefits those who designed it.

4. The Vetoed Justice: How the ICJ Indirectly Serves Power

4.1. Selective Accountability

The ICJ’s procedural openness masks a selective blindness: it scrutinizes weaker states and avoids direct confrontation with major powers. Cases against Western allies or P5 members are either dismissed at the jurisdictional stage or diluted into “advisory opinions.”

This structural bias is not conspiratorial—it is systemic. The ICJ is financially, politically, and diplomatically dependent on the UN ecosystem, which itself is dominated by veto powers.

4.2. Legalization of Inequality

By continuing to operate under the shadow of veto politics, the ICJ legitimizes a two-tier system of international justice:

One for the powerful, who can ignore, evade, or reinterpret rulings.
Another for the powerless, who must comply or face sanctions.

The result is an illusion of global justice, where the rule of law is performative, not operational.

5. The Toothless Court: Enforcement and Compliance Crisis

5.1. No Mechanism of Coercion

The ICJ has no police, no army, and no capacity to impose sanctions. Its orders rely entirely on voluntary compliance. This structural impotence makes it the only global court whose authority depends on the goodwill of those it might judge.

5.2. The Security Council Paradox

When non-compliance occurs, the matter is referred to the Security Council—the very body dominated by the nations most likely to evade accountability. Thus, the enforcer and the offender are often the same.

5.3. Credibility Erosion

Each ignored judgment weakens the ICJ’s credibility. Every unenforced verdict confirms that law without enforcement is ritual, not justice.
In the long run, this erosion endangers not just international law, but global civilization’s moral order—an observation resonant with Civitology’s framework on systemic decay through unregulated power.

6. A Civitological Lens: Justice as a Pillar of Civilizational Longevity

From a Civitology perspective, the ICJ’s failure is not merely legal—it is existential. Civilizations endure only when justice institutions maintain integrity, independence, and enforceability.

The ICJ, as it stands today, exemplifies malintegrity—a consistent and deliberate structural incapacity to correct injustice when power intervenes.
By design, it sustains imbalance rather than correcting it.

If global justice continues to exist only in form and not in force, the long-term outcome is civilizational entropy—where law becomes performance, and peace becomes rhetoric.

7. Reforming the Unreformable: Towards a Democratic World Court

A truly democratic ICJ would require:

Abolition or suspension of veto privileges in enforcement of judicial decisions.
Automatic jurisdiction for all UN member states in cases of gross human rights or international law violations.
An independent enforcement arm under an impartial global mechanism, separate from the Security Council.
Transparent funding and judicial appointments, reducing influence from P5-backed candidates.
Integration with global citizen oversight frameworks, aligning justice with humanity, not geopolitics.

Until such reforms are achieved, the ICJ will remain what it has become:
A court that speaks the truth, yet serves those who silence it.

8. Conclusion

The ICJ was created to prevent war and deliver justice; instead, it has become a ceremonial chamber of appeals for states that already agree to obey. It is neither democratic nor independent—it is structurally submissive to the architecture of veto power.

In the modern age, where genocide, occupation, and environmental crimes persist unchecked, the ICJ’s silence is complicity, and its impotence is failure.

A civilization that allows its highest court to serve power instead of justice is one that stands on the brink of moral and systemic collapse.

Keywords: ICJ, Veto Power, Global Justice, UN Reform, Civitology, International Law, Malintegrity, Institutional Failure

Bharat Luthra Journal

Saturday, November 1, 2025