Julia Sebutinde (born 28 February 1954) is a Ugandan jurist. She is currently serving her second term on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) following her re-election on 12 November 2020.[1] She also is the current chancellor of Muteesa I Royal University, a university owned by the Buganda kingdom. She has been a judge on the court since March 2012. She is the first African woman to sit on the ICJ.[2][3] Before being elected to the ICJ, Sebutinde was a judge of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. She was appointed to that position in 2007.
She was accused of plagiarizing large parts of her dissenting opinion from pro-Israel sources,[26][28] as well as plagiarism from Wikipedia and the BBC. According to political scientist, Norman Finkelstein, "at least 32 percent of Sebutinde’s dissent was plagiarised", including from writings from Douglas Feith.[29]
The plagiarism includes multiple sentences that are identical with the column, The Forgotten History of the Term "Palestine", by Douglas Feith, such as "In 135 CE, after stamping out the second Jewish insurrection of the province of Judea or Judah, the Romans renamed that province 'Syria Palaestina' (or Palestinian Syria). The Romans did this as a punishment, to spite the 'Y’hudim' (Jewish population) and to obliterate the link between them and their province (known in Hebrew as Y’hudah).", appearing almost identical to Feith's writing.[28] Furthermore, Sebutinde also wrote "When the distinguished Arab American historian, Professor Philip Hitti, testified against the Partition of Mandatory Palestine before the Anglo-American Committee in 1946, he remarked: 'There is no such thing as ‘Palestine’ in history; absolutely not.' ", a sentence that is almost identical to a page from the Jewish Virtual Library.[26][28] Other sources that Sebutinde allegedly plagiarized from include a PragerU video from conservative activist David Brog, the Wikipedia page on the Yom Kippur War, a written statement from the International Association of Jewish Lawyers, a statement from Fiji's submission to the ICJ, and a 2016 paper by Abraham Bell and Eugene Kontorovich,[29] the latter of whom "was gratified to see that the dissenting opinion by Judge Sebutinde at the ICJ made significant use of [their] argument".[30]
Pro-Israel Bias
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In August 2025, according to an article in the Daily Monitor she declared at the Watoto Church that "the Lord is counting on me to stand on the side of Israel", shared her "strong conviction that we are in the End Times" prophesied in the Bible, and stated her will "to be on the right side of History".[31] Sebutinde has not contradicted this report so far.[32]
On 25 August 2025, the International Commission of Jurists sent a communication to the president of the International Court of Justice Yuji Iwasawa, and urged him to remove Judge Sebutinde due to her partiality and pro-Israel bias. The International Commission of Jurists requested that the Court "undertake remedial actions consistent with Principles 17-20 of the UN Basic Principles. In the interim, I would request that you act to immediately remove Vice-President Sebutinde from participating further in proceedings in the South Africa v. Israel case." [33]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Sebutinde