The contemporary discourse on genocide is dominated by international criminal law, designed to punish individuals after the fact. Yet the framework derived from Public International Law and the Genocide Convention’s founding purpose was not punishment but prevention. What remains today is an inversion of that project: law intervenes only when prevention has failed, when the catastrophe has already unfolded. The international community’s legal architecture thus performs justice retrospectively, as though theatrical re-enactment could substitute for interruption. Nowhere is this more evident than in the International Court of Justice’s hearings on Gaza, where the legal spectacle unfolds long after the fact, promising order while staging absence.

What we encounter here is less a system of justice than an image of it—what Jean Baudrillard called the simulacrum: the copy that no longer has a connection to its original. International law, in its modern formation, operates through representations that circulate independently of the realities they once claimed to regulate. The ICJ is not simply an arbiter; it is an image-producer. The courtroom becomes a screen upon which the world projects its moral anxieties. As Neal Feigenson and Christina Spiesel note in Law on Display, the contemporary legal order has succumbed to a “visual turn” in which truth becomes indistinguishable from its representation. Drawing on Daniel Kahneman’s insights into cognitive bias, he show how perception folds familiarity into belief: what looks like truth becomes truth. In the courtroom and in global media, the law’s image of justice thus precedes and replaces justice itself.

René Magritte’s La trahison des images (The Treachery of Images, 1929) provides an arresting allegory for this process. His painting of a pipe, captioned Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“This is not a pipe”), unsettles the viewer’s faith in representation. The mind, habituated to equating sign with substance, insists that the image is the thing. In this disjunction between image and referent, Magritte prefigures the crisis of international legality: the ICJ’s hearings, broadcast to millions, are captioned in effect, Ceci n’est pas la justice. They are not justice itself, but its representation—one that displaces the real with its image. In a gesture mirroring Magritte’s, the juxtaposition of his painting and the live feed from The Hague captures the treachery of international law’s formal spaces. The left image, Magritte’s pipe; the right, a solemn tribunal at the Peace Palace. Both proclaim the same truth: representation’s betrayal of reality.

The ICJ’s televised proceedings illustrate what Guy Debord once theorised as the spectacle: the transformation of life into representation, where what was once lived directly has become mere appearance. The genocide footage on Gaza, livestreamed and endlessly replayed over two years, produce a spectacle that aestheticises atrocity. Academic observers such as Sara Kendall and Gerry Simpson have shown that these juridical spectacles sustain faith in international law by simulating its moral authority. The courtroom’s solemn choreography reassures the spectator that law is functioning, even when its interventions remain impotent. The global circulation of these images—across social media feeds and news platforms—constitutes a visual performance of law, where the image of justice stands in for its absence.

Nancy Fraser’s critique of participation and representation exposes the contradictions at the heart of this legal theatre. For Fraser, justice in late-modern societies requires more than recognition; it demands participation in decision-making and representation in political space. Yet the ICJ, as the pinnacle of legal representation, transforms participation into spectatorship. Victims of the violence in Gaza appear only as signifiers, as those spoken for but never speaking. The law, in its universalist posture, becomes the substitute for their voice. This substitution is precisely what sustains its legitimacy: the illusion that justice is being done on their behalf.

People’s tribunals, such as the People’s Tribunal for Gaza (GT), emerge as attempts to challenge this exclusion. They reclaim speech, testimony, and moral outrage. Yet even they cannot escape the problem of representation. Their juridical rituals, their citations of international conventions, their invocation of judgment—all replicate the semiotics of legality they seek to transcend. The GT’s image of justice thus functions within the same symbolic order as the ICJ’s; both are caught within the logic of simulation. The difference is only one of degree, not kind. The ICJ’s power is state-sanctioned; the GT’s, popular and moral. But both operate within what Baudrillard would call a “second-order simulation”: representations that bear no connection to the referent but produce the effect of truth.

In this sense, the law’s promise of justice has been replaced by the performance of its representation. The ICJ’s delays, its cautious language, its inability to prevent ongoing destruction—all mark the exhaustion of law’s deterrent function. The GT, while more agile and ethically charged, remains a derivative form: a repetition of the juridical image, not its transformation. What unites both is their detachment from what they purport to address—the ongoing annihilation of Palestinian life.

Abdelghany Sayed and Luis Eslava, writing in the London Review of International Law, argue that Palestine solidarity gestures toward a recognition that transcends a world where signifier and signified have parted ways. Solidarity becomes not a sign but a mode of relation that reclaims meaning from abstraction. Their reflection reminds us that law’s crisis is not only institutional but semiotic: it has lost its capacity to signify justice. To speak of genocide within the syntax of international law is already to risk participating in its displacement.

This new landscape reconfigures both the object and subject of justice. The ICJ no longer constructs truth; it responds to truths already circulating. The GT no longer constitutes an alternative, but a reflection—another mirror within the hall of representations. Both are implicated in what Feigenson and Spiesel describe as the cognitive illusion of truth by repetition: seeing justice, we believe it has occurred. The simulacrum has become self-sufficient.

Placed side by side, Magritte’s painting and the ICJ screenshot become visual theses. The first disavows identification—this is not a pipe. The second should, but does not, disavow its own claim—this is not justice. Both, however, participate in the same visual economy: each depends on our willingness to forget the difference between representation and reality. The ICJ’s authority, like the image’s illusion, depends on the viewer’s faith.

It is in this context that the Gaza Tribunal takes on both urgency and futility. It seeks to restore meaning where international law has lost it, to speak truth where the ICJ cannot. Yet, in doing so, it risks becoming another sign within the same order of simulation—a people’s mirror of a state’s court, each reflecting the other. The question is not whether the GT is legitimate but whether legitimacy itself can survive the collapse of referentiality. If both law and its critique operate through images that have lost their originals, then perhaps the only remaining act of justice is the refusal to mistake the image for the thing.

The ICJ’s ornate chamber, its processions, and its deferential tone exemplify what Debord warned: the spectacle not only shows but reproduces power. The viewer’s belief in law’s image sustains the very hierarchy that renders law impotent. The People’s Tribunal, in mirroring that form, repeats the gesture of faith that justice can be represented at all. In both cases, justice becomes a performance that conceals its own impossibility.

The representation may no longer bear a connection to what it purports to represent. Both the ICJ and the People’s Tribunal for Gaza have become simulacra of justice: representations detached from the referent of suffering they claim to address. They embody what Baudrillard foresaw—the collapse of the distinction between reality and representation, between the original crime and its juridical reflection. To watch their proceedings is to witness law’s image devouring its substance.

In this short reflection, I have sought to show how the simulacrum of justice comes to represent justice but no longer bears connection to the situation in Gaza that it purports to represent. The People’s Tribunal for Gaza and the ICJ alike demonstrate that representation, when severed from its referent, produces not justice but its likeness. The courtroom’s image—like Magritte’s pipe—reassures the viewer that justice exists, even when it has already disappeared. As Baudrillard warned, when the copy replaces the original, meaning itself dissolves. Perhaps this is where international law now stands: performing justice endlessly, before the ruins of its referent. Ceci n’est pas la justice.

To the left: René Magritte’s La trahison des images (The Treachery of Images – This is Not a Pipe, 1929). To the right: a screenshot of the ICJ’s Gaza hearings, 2024. Two images, distinct yet alike, each proclaiming what they are not—justice’s double absence.

Jessica Elias is a PhD Candidate at Kent Law School and gives an insider/outsider’s view on the topic as a former Researcher at The Hague courts and Lecturer of Cultural Studies