In May, the Guardian published corrections to two articles following our complaints about misleading language used to describe the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) preliminary decision on the genocide charge against Israel. As we noted at the time, the January ruling was widely misrepresented throughout the Western media, falsely claiming that the court ruled that Israel was “plausibly” committing genocide.
That narrative was fatally undermined in April when Joan O’Donoghue, the former President of the ICJ, stated clearly on a BBC interview that the court did NOT rule that the CLAIM of genocide is “plausible”, nor did it rule (in any way) on the merits of the charge. They narrowly ruled that “there was a risk of irreparable harm to the Palestinian right to be protected from genocide”
Thus, following our complaint which cited Ms. O’Donoghue’s clarification, Guardian editors corrected an article by Daniel Hurst at the outlet (“Fatima Payman accuses Israel of genocide in Gaza in significant rupture with Labor party position”, May 15) which erred by asserting that the ICJ’s interim ruling found the the claims of genocide were “plausible”.
The sentence was amended to correctly state that the ICJ ruled that “at least some of the rights claimed by South Africa” were “plausible”, and the following correction note added:
Another Guardian op-ed, by Miqdaad Versi, spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, (“There is a way for Starmer’s Labour to fix the big rift with Muslim voters – if it has the will”, May 6), claiming that “the [ICJ] considered Israel to be plausibly committing genocide” was also corrected following our complaint. The wording was revised, and the correction note states the following:
As you can see, the corrections were clear, and consistent with O’Donoghue’s explanation on the BBC program. However, in response to two subsequent complaints we sent to the Guardian over more recent articles containing the same errors regarding the ICJ ruling, editors failed to make accurate corrections.
In an op-ed by Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi (“Nearly 21,000 children are missing in Gaza. And there’s no end to this nightmare”, June 27), it was claimed that “the ICJ…has ruled that South Africa’s claims of genocide are “plausible”. Following our complaint, the text was only slightly revised to “the international court of justice has found to be a “plausible risk of genocide“. Here’s the correction note:
This language is significantly different than the wording of the two previous corrections, which made it clear that the court did NOT rule on the merits of the charge, but only on the “plausibility” of the Palestinians’ right to be protected. If you search the full ICJ ruling document, you will see that there is no assertion that there is a “risk” of genocide occurring.
Similarly, on July 12, we complained about another piece which misrepresented the ICJ decision. The op-ed, by the outlet’s data editor Mona Chalabi (“Why researchers fear the Gaza death toll could reach 186,000″, July 12, which shamefully legitimised a fictitious allegation on the Gaza death count based on a non-peer reviewed letter in The Lancet, also alleged that the ICJ…ruled that South Africa’s claims of genocide are “plausible”.
In response to our complaint to that op-ed, editors again merely changed the wording from “claims of genocide” being “plausible” to “risks of genocide” being “plausible”. Here’s the misleading ‘correction’ note:
We contacted the Guardian to ask that the wording of both the text and the correction note be revised to accurately reflect the ICJ’s decision as outlined by the court’s former president.
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