In May, the Guardian published corrections to two articles following our complaints about inaccurate 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 (“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:
However, in three subsequent Guardian op-eds or articles which contained the same error, the outlet failed to make the necessary corrections. The most recent introduction of the error, which, despite our complaint, hasn’t been corrected, is in an article (“UN should consider suspending Israel over ‘genocide’ against Palestinians, says special rapporteur”, Oct. 31) by their diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour.
Here’s the relevant sentence:
The term genocide has been routinely used by pro-Palestinian protesters, as well as by many Arab leaders. The international court of justice has said there is a plausible case that a genocide is being committed, but has not gone any further.
In our complaint, we cited, in addition to their two previous corrections, the fact that the BBC recently upheld our complaint on that same error about the ICJ decision.
This morning, we sent a second email to Guardian editors asking that the article by Wintour be amended.
