Tag Archives: judge

New judge elected to the International Court of Justice

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Mahmoud Daifallah Hmoud was appointed following a parallel and independent voting process in the General Assembly and Security Council, conducted by secret ballot.

He will fill the vacancy left by former ICJ President Nawaf Salam of Lebanon, who resigned in January to become the country’s Prime Minister.

He will hold office for the remainder of Judge Salam’s term, which was set to end on 5 February 2027.

Absolute majority

Mr. Hmoud was the sole person vying for the slot and he was nominated by Egypt, Jordan, Romania, Slovakia and Sweden.

Candidates must secure an absolute majority in both the General Assembly and the Security Council, or 97 and eight votes respectively.

All 15 Council members voted in his favour while in the General Assembly, which comprises all 193 UN Member States, he received the support of 178 out of 181 countries who took part in the vote.  Three countries abstained.

Mr. Hmoud has been Jordan’s Ambassador to the UN in New York since September 2021 and his other postings include Legal Adviser and Director of the Legal Department in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

He is also a former chairman and member of the International Law Commission, a UN expert body that promotes the development and codification of international law.

The towers and gables of the Peace Palace, home of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague.

The towers and gables of the Peace Palace, home of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague.

The ‘world court’

The ICJ, informally known as the “world court”, settles legal disputes between UN Member States and gives advisory opinions on legal questions that have been referred to it by UN organs and agencies.

It has been in the spotlight following an advisory opinion, issued last July, which said that Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, “is unlawful.”

Last month, hearings began into Israel’s continuing restriction on the work of UN and other international agencies operating in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT).

The Court is composed of 15 judges who serve nine-year terms. Five seats come up for election every three years and there is no bar on consecutive terms.

Judges are chosen on the basis of their qualifications, not their nationality; however, no two judges can be from the same country.

The ICJ was established in June 1945 and is based at the Peace Palace in The Hague, a city in the Netherlands.

It is one of the six main organs of the UN – alongside the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the Trusteeship Council, and the Secretariat – and is the only one not based in New York.

Find out more about the ICJ and its role in global peace and security here. 

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People find it difficult to judge how good their intuitions are

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Whether people believe they are ‘intuitive’ or not may have no bearing on how they perform in tasks that require intuition, according to new research by psychologists at the University of Kent.

Researchers Dr Mario Weick and Stefan Leach, of the University’s School of Psychology, found that the extent to which people feel confident about, and endorse, their intuitions may often not provide an indication of how good their intuitions actually are.

The researchers asked 400 people from the UK and US to complete a questionnaire to find out how much of an ‘intuitive’ person they were. They then required the study participants to perform a series of tasks that involved learning new and complex associations between letters and images. The associations followed certain patterns and the task was designed in a way that encouraged learning of the underlying rules without people realising this was happening.

The researchers found that people who described themselves as intuitive did not perform better and had no superior grasp of the rules than people who did not think of themselves as intuitive.

The researchers also asked participants more specifically about the task they performed and how confident they were that their intuitions were accurate.

They found that this task-specific measure was so weakly related to performance that nine out of ten times someone with high levels of confidence in his or her intuition would have not performed any better than someone with low levels of confidence.

The paper, entitled Can people judge the veracity of their intuitions? is published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.