The International Court of Justice never said that

In dozens of news items spanning more than three months, the Associated Press committed one of the most egregious journalistic transgressions: misattributing a false quote to a source. 

Compounding the gravity of the professional misstep, the source in question is the influential International Court of Justice and the weighty content concerns accusations that Israel is conducting genocide in the Gaza Strip.

The AP’s ICJ false quote fiasco started April 4, with the initial appearance of the fallacious quotation misattributed to the court’s Jan. 26 preliminary ruling regarding South Africa’s charges of Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip. 

In a story that day about 600 British jurists who called for a suspension of arms sales to Israel, AP’s Jill Lawless misreported  (“Senior UK jurists have joined calls to stop arms sales to Israel. . .”):

Signatories, including former Supreme Court President Brenda Hale, said Britain is legally obliged to heed the International Court of Justice’s conclusion that there is a “plausible risk of genocide” in Gaza. [Emphasis added.]

While the jurists’ April 3 open letter calling for a halt to arms sales cited what it called “the provisional order of the International Court of Justice dated 26 January 2024, by which the Court concluded that there was a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza,” the court reached no such conclusion.

UK Lawyers for Israel, which organized an opposing April 8 letter imploring then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to reject calls to halt arms shipments to Israel, explained that “the Court merely held in its first Provisional Measures Order that Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have plausible rights to be protected from acts of genocide.”

Notably, the AP completely ignored UK Lawyers for Israel’s letter, which garnered signatures from more than 1,375 leading jurists. (The anti-Israel letter had just 600 signatures, but was somehow considered highly newsworthy just days earlier.) 

Skeptics need not trust the word of some 1,400 jurists backing the pro-Israel letter. The most knowledgeable and authoritative source on the matter, the ICJ president herself, also confirmed that the court’s ruling made no determination of a “plausible risk of genocide” in Gaza. As ICJ President Joan Donoghue explained to the BBC:

I’m glad I have a chance to address that because the court test for deciding whether to impose measures uses the idea of plausibility, but the test is the plausibility of the rights that are asserted by the applicant, in this case, South Africa. So the Court decided that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide and that South Africa had the right to present that claim in the court. It then looked at the facts as well but it did not decide – and this is something where I’m correcting what’s often said in the media – it didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible. It did emphasize in the order that there was a risk of irreparable harm to the Palestinian right to be protected from genocide. But the shorthand that often appears, which is that there is a plausible case of genocide isn’t what the court decided.

Another sure way to verify the contents of the ICJ’s ruling is to read it. A quick read or word search confirms that the language simply does not exist in the court’s ruling. Moreover, there is zero support in the order for the claim that the ICJ found genocide “plausible.”

Skipping the primary source, AP’s Lawless relied on misinformation supplied by a partisan secondary source. Worse, she elevated the anti-Israel letter’s false assertion into a direct quote from the ICJ itself, replete with sacrosanct quotation marks.

From Lawless’s April 4 article, the misquote traveled into that day’s “The Latest” roundup of Israel-Hamas war developments. In short order, the false quote became a regular fixture in AP’s “latest” updates and also appeared in full news stories, including most recently on July 6.

AP’s cozy coexistence with a false quote attributed to a leading international court on the not-so-trivial matter of genocide persisted entirely undisturbed until July 8. At that point, CAMERA flagged the issue for AP editors.

Editors promptly amended that day’s “The Latest,” removing the false quote and substituting in the following accurate language:

The top U.N. court has ordered Israel to take steps to protect the Palestinians as it examines genocide allegations against Israeli leaders. Israel strongly denies the charge.

Subsequent AP reporting also now includes the new accurate language. Although these are positive steps, they are also grossly inadequate. The false quote lingers uncorrected for digital posterity in more than three dozen AP items dating back to April 4.

Moreover, despite the severity and redundancy of the misquote, AP did not publish an actual correction making clear to readers that it had fouled up.

In contrast, several major media outlets have previously published corrections about the identical error, in addition to amending the language of the erroneous report. For instance, the second of two Guardian corrections on the subject prompted by CAMERA UK in May stated: 

This article was amended on 16 May 2024 to clarify the findings of the international court of justice, which ruled on the Palestinians’ plausible right to be protected from genocide, rather than the plausibility of the claims of genocide.

CAMERA staff also elicited corrections on the identical topic at CNN (in three separate articles) as well as at the BBC.

The Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) calls on journalists to “Take responsibility for the accuracy of their work. Verify information before releasing it. Use original sources whenever possible.” Yes, that’s an actual, precise and verifiable quote.

It also implores: “Acknowledge mistakes and correct them promptly and prominently.”

In its months-long repetition of a bogus quote, followed by the scandalous failure to forthrightly correct the long and sordid record, AP runs a plausible risk of grossly unethical journalism.

You can quote me on that. Accurately, of course.