By Amara Osei

The International Court of Justice could spend years arriving at any verdict on whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The 153 states party to the 1948 Genocide Convention have no such luxury. That is the hinge of a recent analysis from The Conversation: legal deliberation moves on its own schedule, while the convention's prevention duty runs without pause.

What did the headline argument set out?

The headline posed the genocide question, named the deciding body, and announced the timeline in three short clauses. It then summoned the reader to the legal consequence: states must act now. The piece thus treats the slow pace of international adjudication as the operative problem, not the court's eventual answer. The genocide verdict becomes a backdrop. The immediate duty becomes the foreground. Both moves are deliberate. They reweight the reader's attention from courtroom drama to cabinet-room decision.

Why does the timeline matter?

The ICJ is a court of measured tempo. Provisional measures can issue within weeks where urgency is shown. Merits judgments, however, routinely span three to seven years once jurisdiction is settled. Written pleadings, oral hearings, and deliberation can stretch a single dispute across an entire presidential term in some case files. Adjournments for bench changes, requests for additional evidence, and translation cycles add further months. The court moves. It does not sprint.

What duty rests on states now?

Article I of the Genocide Convention obligates the contracting parties to prevent the crime and to punish those who commit it. The undertaking is collective and individual at once. A state that learns of a serious risk to a protected group and has the means to influence the outcome must employ those means. Domestic courts, in parallel, retain universal jurisdiction over genocide as defined in Articles II and III.

The obligation, read in plain text:

• States undertake to prevent and to punish under Article I.
• The duty activates on knowledge of a serious risk.
• Permitted measures range from diplomatic to judicial.
• No prior court ruling is required.

The framing is plain: the duty fires the moment the risk is known.

How does The Conversation frame the problem?

The piece converts procedural delay into substantive urgency. What the court cannot decide today, governments must still address today. The framing treats a future genocide determination as plausible enough to warrant current action. It positions the eventual verdict as confirmation of a duty already triggered. That rhetorical move flatters the convention's drafters, who built prevention into the treaty's first sentence precisely because deliberation arrives too late for the victims.

What does this mean for practitioners?

Foreign-policy lawyers advising ministries should plan on the assumption that a future genocide finding is plausible. The advisory duty under Article I shifts the brief from patience to preparation. Memoranda resting on "wait for the court" will not shield clients from responsibility in any later reparation claim. Domestic prosecutors, for their part, may need to revisit universal-jurisdiction files that depend on extraterritorial evidence and on the cooperation of foreign witnesses. NGO counsel filing amicus briefs before the ICJ should likewise anticipate arguments that may outlast the merits phase.

The simple verdict: briefs built on delay do not age well.

A blunt takeaway: the prevention clock does not pause for the World Court's calendar.