Back in April 2024 the BBC conducted an interview with the former head of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in which she explained the meaning of a decision issued by that court in January of that year.
“Joan Donoghue, who has just retired as president of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), spoke to BBC Hardtalk’s Stephen Sackur about the case brought by South Africa to the ICJ over alleged violations of the Genocide Convention by Israel.
Ms Donoghue explained that the court decided 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.
She said that, contrary to some reporting, the court did not make a ruling on whether the claim of genocide was plausible, but it did emphasise in its order that there was a risk of irreparable harm to the Palestinian right to be protected from genocide.”
Following that interview, CAMERA UK submitted a complaint to the BBC concerning inaccurate portrayals of that decision in nine items of content published between January 2024 and April 2024.
A BBC INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS MULTIPLE BBC MISREPRESENTATIONS OF ICJ RULING
A month later the BBC informed us that the timeframe for addressing our complaint had expired. However, as we documented at the time, six of the nine items we flagged up had already been corrected:
BBC UNABLE TO REPLY TO A COMPLAINT ABOUT ITEMS IT ALREADY AMENDED
“In other words, nearly a week before the BBC told us that it had “not been able to reply to your complaint within the time period we aim for” it had already made changes to most of the items that were the topic of that complaint. The BBC’s response also told us that we could “refer this delay and the substance of your complaint to the BBC’s regulator Ofcom” if we so wished.
Fortunately, before wasting Ofcom’s time and resources, we checked the items concerned before taking up that suggestion.”
On August 22nd 2025 – nearly sixteen months after that complaint had been submitted – we received an email from the BBC which opens as follows:
“We’ve been doing an audit of our complaints system and have unfortunately found some complaints that didn’t receive a reply from the newsroom when they were submitted, this one included, for which we would like to offer sincere apologies.
Please be assured that your feedback was logged at the time and shared with senior editors via our overnight reports.
However, we do appreciate that you did not receive an editorial response so even though quite some time has elapsed we’d like to provide one now.”
That email continues:
“On 26 April, we published this interview between Stephen Sackur and Joan Donoghue, former president of the International Court of Justice –
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-middle-east-68906919
She said in the interview: The test is the plausibility of the rights which 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.
You provided us a list of reports which you considered should be amended accordingly.
We made all the amendments we considered necessary in May 2024.”
The email goes on to list the six corrections that CAMERA UK had already documented in May 2024. It then turns to the topic of the three items which were not amended.
“However, we have not amended the sentence in this report – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68108260 – which says: The ICJ found it did have jurisdiction on the matter, and decided there was a plausible case under the 1948 Genocide Convention, and that the Palestinian population in Gaza was at real risk of irreparable damage.
This is because we believe the sentence is duly accurate. It says the court had ruled the case being brought was plausible, not that the allegations of genocide were plausible.
We have not amended the sentence in this report – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68729302 – which says: Earlier, 600 legal experts wrote to the government saying weapon exports must end because the UK risks breaking international law over a “plausible risk of genocide” in Gaza.
This is because the report was not about the ICJ ruling, but about a letter written by legal experts to the UK government. We accurately reported what the legal experts had written in their letter. We reported: Earlier, 600 legal experts wrote to the government saying weapon exports must end because the UK risks breaking international law over a “plausible risk of genocide” in Gaza
We have not amended the sentence in the synopsis of this interview between Stephen Sackur and Joan Donahoe [sic] – https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct5stw – which says: In January, the court found there was a plausible case for Israel to answer for alleged violation of the Genocide Convention.
We believe the sentence in the synopsis was a duly accurate summary of the ruling, as clarified by Ms Donoghue. Again, it makes clear that the ICJ ruled that the case being brought is plausible, rather than the allegations of genocide.
Therefore, we believe we made all the amendments necessary to our published content in the light of the clarification of the ICJ’s ruling, and did so in a prompt fashion, in accordance with our Editorial Guidelines.”
Beyond the important topic of the BBC’s chronic failure to respond to complaints within its self-defined timeframe and the issues that raises regarding the BBC complaints procedure as a whole, this case raises additional questions.
The first of those questions is why did the BBC repeatedly present its audiences with inaccurate portrayals of that ICJ ruling in the three months between late January and late April 2024? The ICJ’s ruling was issued on January 26th 2024. One might have expected that, given the contentious nature of the subject matter and the fact that most BBC reporters will not have any legal training, the corporation would have consulted with someone who does and then issued a memo explaining the ICJ ruling to its staff in layperson’s language so that it would not be misrepresented in BBC content.
That clearly was not done, with the result being that, for whatever reasons, BBC journalists promoted their own inaccurate interpretations of the ICJ’s ruling under the label of ‘accurate and impartial’ reporting.
Additional examples which were not cited in our original complaint include:
ANOTHER CASE OF BBC MISREPRESENTATION OF THE ICJ RULING February 11 2024 (corrected)
BBC RADIO 4’S ‘TODAY’ PLATFORMS DISINFORMATION ON ICJ RULING May 9 2024
BBC RADIO SCOTLAND PROMOTES MORE ICJ DISINFORMATION May 13 2024 (corrected)
Only on May 16th 2024 – almost four months after the ICJ ruling had been issued and over two weeks after CAMERA UK submitted its complaint – was a report by the BBC’s legal correspondent explaining that ruling published on the BBC News website.
The second question is why, after the BBC had already corrected six items and its legal correspondent had explained the meaning of the ICJ’s ruling, did audiences continue to be misled on that topic by both BBC journalists and contributors. For example:
BBC WS RADIO PROMOTES ‘GENOCIDE’ MISINFORMATION YET AGAIN September 13 2024 (complaint submitted, no response received)
BBC FRAMING OF HIZBALLAH COMMUNICATIONS DEVICES EXPLOSIONS September 18 2024 (eventually corrected)
BBC AUDIENCES ONCE AGAIN HEAR ‘GENOCIDE’ DISINFORMATION November 27 2024
BBC RADIO 4 PODCAST PROMOTES STILL MORE ‘GENOCIDE’ DISINFORMATION November 30 2024 (corrected)
BBC’S BOWEN STILL PROMOTING ICJ DISINFORMATION AFTER CORRECTIONS (complaint rejected)
An efficient and effective BBC complaints procedure would include mechanisms to ensure that inaccuracies which have already been acknowledged and corrected do not reappear in BBC content. The fact that no such mechanism appears to exist is particularly damaging to a media organisation which, even as disinformation concerning the ICJ ruling continued to appear on its various platforms, was touting itself as “leading the global fight against disinformation”.
