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Arab News
4 days ago
- Politics
- Arab News
Why the Nile dam crisis demands action and accountability
The dispute over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has become one of the world's major water conflicts. In recent weeks, it has gained renewed international attention, particularly after remarks from US President Donald Trump and a declaration by Ethiopia. As Ethiopia celebrates the 'completion' of the dam, Egypt views the announcement as a direct challenge to international law and a threat to the foundation of its national security. With its inauguration set for September, the question remains: will diplomacy prevail or will unilateralism triumph over cooperation? The GERD is Africa's largest hydroelectric power project, constructed by Ethiopia on the Blue Nile, the main tributary of the Nile River. Launched in 2011, the dam is expected to generate more than 6,000 megawatts of electricity. While it promises much-needed energy for Ethiopia's population, the project has been controversial from the start. Egypt depends on the Nile for 97 percent of its freshwater needs. For more than a century, its water rights were guaranteed by treaties and its downstream position. But the GERD, located just a few kilometers from the Sudanese border, threatens to disrupt that balance. In Cairo, the concern is existential. Despite years of negotiations and a 2015 Declaration of Principles signed by Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan, Addis Ababa has pressed ahead with construction and the phased filling of the dam's reservoir without a binding legal agreement on its operation. Cairo has repeatedly warned that such actions violate international norms governing transboundary watercourses. Ethiopia, however, has largely ignored these warnings, framing the GERD as a sovereign project. Trump this month broke the American diplomatic silence that had defined the Biden years, issuing frank statements about the dam. Speaking at a press conference, Trump described the Nile as the 'lifeline' of the Egyptian people, a description that aligns precisely with Cairo's long-standing argument. He also criticized the American role in having, as he put it, 'stupidly funded' the dam without adequately addressing its consequences. 'I do not know why they didn't solve the problem before they built the dam,' Trump said. For Egypt, these remarks were not only long overdue, but they were also a validation. President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi welcomed the comments, praising Trump's stance. Egyptian diplomats saw the US president's statements as a diplomatic turning point, bringing renewed pressure to bear on Ethiopia's unilateralism. From Ethiopia's side, the response was defensive and dismissive. Officials said the dam was funded domestically and some even portrayed Trump's comments as an insult to Ethiopia's sovereignty. But the broader reality is hard to ignore: the GERD has become a global concern and Ethiopia's dismissiveness only reinforces the perception that it is acting outside the bounds of international consensus. Days before Trump's remarks, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced that all construction on the GERD had been completed. He declared that the dam would be officially inaugurated in September, calling it a victory for Ethiopia and inviting neighboring countries to join in the celebration. Trump this month broke the American diplomatic silence, issuing frank statements about the dam. Dr. Abdellatif El-Menawy But in Egypt, this announcement was met with alarm. Cairo immediately condemned the move as a 'flagrant violation of international law' and an act of provocation. The Egyptian Ministry of Water Resources issued a statement calling Ethiopia's behavior 'destabilizing,' arguing that the move to operate the dam unilaterally undermines every principle of cooperation and trust in international water governance. The Ethiopian government claims that the dam will not reduce water flow downstream and that Egypt's concerns are exaggerated. But these assurances ring hollow, as experts note that the GERD's reservoir can hold 74 billion cubic meters of water, almost the entire annual flow of the Blue Nile. Egypt, already below the global water poverty line, cannot gamble on goodwill. Ethiopia has repeatedly rejected calls to sign a legally binding agreement governing how the dam is filled and managed during droughts. This refusal alone should cause alarm in the international community. What nation would accept such unilateral control over its primary source of life? Sudan, Egypt's southern neighbor and fellow downstream country, has long had an ambivalent position on the GERD. At times, it saw possible benefits, such as regulated water flow and access to cheap electricity. But in recent years, Khartoum has leaned closer to Cairo's position, especially after experiencing erratic water releases and infrastructure concerns. Today, Sudan is wracked by internal conflict and thus largely sidelined in the GERD diplomacy. However, the interim leadership has reaffirmed its opposition to any unilateral action by Ethiopia. In a meeting with El-Sisi last month, Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan stressed the need for a coordinated solution and joint safeguards. More broadly, the GERD dispute could destabilize the region. It threatens to fracture regional relations, provoke proxy conflicts and fuel instability in a region already grappling with conflict, economic crisis and foreign intervention. Under international law, the use of shared rivers is governed by two core principles: equitable and reasonable use, and the obligation not to cause significant harm. Egypt has abided by these rules and has called, again and again, for negotiations to reach a fair agreement. Ethiopia has adopted a narrow definition of sovereignty that places its national interests above regional stability. While no one denies Ethiopia's right to development, that right must be exercised within a framework of shared responsibility. It cannot come at the expense of 100 million Egyptians and the security of an entire region. The GERD is not a local dam. It is a regional project with continental consequences. Its success or failure will signal whether powerful upstream states can impose their will on downstream neighbors without consequence, or whether diplomacy, legality and fairness can still shape international outcomes. With the dam's inauguration looming and the US now taking a more decisive tone, the coming months will determine the future of one of the most important rivers on Earth. Trump's words, if backed by action, could revive negotiations and pressure Ethiopia to concede. But the international community must act decisively. Ethiopia's unilateralism cannot become the new norm. Letting one country control another's lifeline — without oversight, agreement or accountability — sets a dangerous precedent not just for Africa but for all transboundary river systems around the world.
Al Jazeera
09-07-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Can India stop Pakistan's river water — and will it spark a new war?
Islamabad, Pakistan – Seven decades ago, one of South Asia's greatest fiction writers, Saadat Hasan Manto, published a short story set in a village in Pakistan's Punjab province. The plot revolved around rumours of an Indian plan to 'shut down' water to Pakistan by closing off rivers that irrigated the province's crops. A character in the 1951 story titled Yazid responds to that chatter by saying, '…who can close a river; it's a river, not a drain.' That theory is now on test, 74 years later — with implications for two of the world's most populous nations that are also nuclear-armed neighbours. In April 2025, after gunmen killed 26 civilians, almost all tourists, in an attack in Indian-administered Kashmir, New Delhi blamed armed groups that it said were backed by Pakistan for the violence. India announced it was walking out of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), a six-decade-old transboundary water agreement that governs the division of water from the Indus Basin's six rivers. The treaty is a lifeline for more than 270 million people, most of whom live in Pakistan. A day after India's announcement, Pakistan's National Security Committee (NSC), the country's top security body, rejected the 'unilateral' move, warning that 'any diversion of Pakistan's water is to be treated as an act of war'. In the weeks that followed, India and Pakistan engaged in an intense four-day conflict in May, during which both countries exchanged missile and drone strikes, before US President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire between them. But though the guns have fallen silent, for now, the neighbours have both launched diplomatic campaigns aimed at convincing the world about their narratives. And India has refused to reconsider its decision to set aside the IWT. On June 21, Amit Shah, India's home minister and the man widely considered as the second-in-command to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, declared the treaty would remain suspended permanently. 'It will never be restored. International treaties cannot be annulled unilaterally, but we had the right to put it in abeyance, which we have done,' Shah told The Times of India, the country's leading newspaper, in an interview. 'The treaty preamble mentions that it was for peace and progress of the two countries, but once that has been violated, there is nothing left to protect,' he said. For Pakistan, a lower riparian country, even the possibility of water disruption is an existential threat. Blocking river flows threatens agriculture, food security, and the livelihoods of millions. It could also, warn experts, set the stage for a full-fledged war between India and Pakistan. So can India really stop Pakistan's water? And can Pakistan do anything to mitigate that risk? The short answer: India cannot completely stop the flow of rivers into Pakistan, given the current infrastructure that it has. But experts caution that even a small diversion or blockage could hurt Pakistan, particularly during the winter season. And at the moment, Pakistan does not have the reservoirs it needs to store enough water to deal with the crisis it would face if India were to manage to stop the flow of the Indus Basin rivers. A river that defines the region The mighty Indus River, the 12th longest in the world, originates from Mount Kailash in Tibet at an elevation of 5,490 metres (18,000 feet). It flows northwest, cutting through the scenic yet disputed Kashmir region, before entering Pakistan and travelling some 3,000 kilometres (1,864 miles) south to the Arabian Sea. In Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, the Indus is joined by its western tributaries – the Swat and Kabul Rivers – as it carves through mountainous terrain. Entering the fertile plains of Punjab, the river's five eastern tributaries — the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej — meet the Indus. These rivers flow through Indian-administered Kashmir and other Indian states before entering Pakistan. This geographic dynamic, with India as the upper riparian state and Pakistan the lower state, has fed into long-standing distrust between the neighbours. To be clear, transboundary water conflicts are not exclusive to Pakistan and India, and historians have recorded wars over water since ancient times. In the last half a century alone, Turkiye, Syria and Iraq have had disputes over water sharing due to the construction of dams on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. More recently, there is an ongoing water conflict between Egypt and Sudan against Ethiopia, an upper riparian state constructing a dam on the Nile, causing insecurity among the two lower riparian nations. In South Asia itself, Bangladesh, India and Nepal have water-sharing disputes over the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna rivers system. Partition's lingering legacy As with most India-Pakistan disputes, the two countries' tensions over water are rooted in the partition of the subcontinent in August 1947, when both nations gained independence from British colonial rule. The region of Jammu and Kashmir, where the Jhelum originates and the Chenab flows, became a central point of conflict. But another critical issue was the division of Punjab's irrigation system, which had operated as a unified network under British rule. Canals, rivers and headworks were all intertwined, complicating water sharing. A short-lived agreement held until March 1948, when India suspended water flow through two canals into Pakistan. The stoppage left nearly eight percent of cultivable land in Pakistani Punjab without water for five weeks. That early crisis inspired Manto's Yazid and served as the catalyst for the Indus Waters Treaty. With World Bank mediation and financial support, the treaty [PDF] was signed in September 1960, after nine years of negotiations between India and Pakistan. According to Majed Akhter, senior lecturer in geography at King's College London, the treaty was a 'hydraulic partition' that followed political partition. 'It was needed to resolve issues of the operation of an integrated irrigation system in Punjab, a province which the British invested heavily in and that was partitioned in 1947,' he told Al Jazeera. But Akhter pointed out that water sharing between the neighbours is also linked to their dispute over Kashmir. Both India and Pakistan control parts of the region, with China also administering two slices of Kashmir. India, however, claims all of Kashmir, and Pakistan claims all of the region other than the parts controlled by China, its ally. 'Territorial control of Kashmir means control of the waters of the Indus, which is the main source of water for the heavily agrarian economies' of Pakistan and India, Akhter said. India and Pakistan have fought three of their four wars over Kashmir, before the latest conflict in May. Treaty that divided the rivers The 85-page treaty is unusually structured. Unlike most global water treaties that share water according to their total volume of flows, the IWT divides the rivers. The three eastern rivers – Ravi, Sutlej, and Beas – were allocated entirely to India, while the three western rivers – Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab – were reserved for Pakistan's exclusive use. India, however, was permitted to build 'run-of-the-river' hydroelectric projects on the western rivers, provided they adhered to design limitations meant to ensure uninterrupted water flow to Pakistan. The treaty also has a three-tiered dispute resolution mechanism. Any technical questions are brought before the Permanent Indus Commission, a standing bilateral body composed of one commissioner from each country, which is set up under the IWT clauses. If the commission can't resolve any differences, the matter is then referred to a neutral expert under the supervision of the World Bank. If the dispute still remains unresolved, it can then be taken to the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA). The Hague-based PCA is not a United Nations agency but an intergovernmental organisation to which countries go to 'facilitate arbitration and other forms of dispute resolution between states'. Though the treaty has been in place for over six decades, this formal dispute resolution path has only been invoked in three cases, all involving Indian hydroelectric power projects on western rivers: Baglihar, Kishenganga and Ratle. India was able to win its case regarding Baglihar, a dam built on the Chenab, before a neutral expert in 2007, following which the project started operating a year later. The Kishenganga project, built on the Jhelum, again faced resistance from Pakistan, which claimed the construction would impact water flow into Pakistan-administered Kashmir. The matter was taken to the PCA, where a 2013 decision allowed India to divert water for power generation purposes, while ensuring that water flow towards Pakistan continued. The project was inaugurated in 2018 by Indian PM Modi. The Ratle hydroelectric plant, also being constructed on the Chenab, is the latest flashpoint between the two neighbours. Pakistan has sought the PCA's involvement over the dispute, but India has argued that under the IWT, the countries need to first go before a neutral expert. However, with India now no longer adhering to the water-sharing treaty, a cloud hovers over the arbitration process, while construction on the project continues. 'Blood and water' Over its 65-year history, the IWT has withstood major pressures: Wars, a secessionist movement in Indian-administered Kashmir, recurring military skirmishes, deadly attacks in India that New Delhi has blamed on Pakistan-backed armed groups, and even nuclear tests by India and Pakistan. The April 2025 Pahalgam attack marked a breaking point. But signs of the treaty's fragility had emerged long before that. In September 2016, following an attack on an Indian Army base in Uri, a town in Indian-administered Kashmir, that killed at least 18 Indian soldiers, India accused the Jaish-e-Muhammad, a Pakistan-based armed group that has carried out multiple attacks on Indian soil, of being behind the Uri strike. Pakistan swiftly denied any involvement of its government, but India's then-Home Minister Rajnath Singh branded Pakistan a 'terrorist state' that supported 'terrorists and terrorism groups'. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, then in his first term leading the Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party, declared, 'Blood and water cannot flow at the same time', amid growing calls within India to stop the flow of water in Pakistan. Nine years later, after India actually walked out of the treaty, former Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari issued a warning even more chilling than Modi's original comment. 'The Indus is ours and will remain ours, either our water will flow through it, or their blood,' he thundered at an April rally in Sindh, a province named after the Indus River (Sindhu in Sanskrit). Symbolism or substance? Several water experts argue that India's suspension of the IWT is more symbolic than immediately harmful to Pakistan. Naseer Memon, an Islamabad-based environmental and water expert, called it a 'political gimmick' designed to generate anxiety in Pakistan rather than alter water flows. First, there's international law, which Pakistan believes is on its side. 'Modi is trying to portray that he would stop Pakistan's water immediately. But legally, he cannot decide anything about the IWT unilaterally,' Memon told Al Jazeera. Three weeks after India's suspension of the treaty, Ajay Banga, the Indian-American president of the World Bank, also said that there is no provision in the IWT that allows a party to unilaterally suspend the treaty. 'There is no provision in the treaty to allow to be suspended. The way it was drawn up, it either needs to be gone or it needs to be replaced by another one. That requires the two countries to want to agree,' he said during a visit to New Delhi in May. Geography and infrastructure also limit what India can do. Daanish Mustafa, professor of critical geography at King's College London, argued that these factors protect Pakistan more than its policymakers on either side acknowledge. 'The fanatic attachment to hydro-control in India and hydro-vulnerability in Pakistan is almost comical,' he told Al Jazeera. Of the six rivers in the Indus Basin, the waters of three — the Sutlej, Beas and Ravi — are in any case only for India's use, under the IWT. Of the three rivers whose waters belong to Pakistan, the Indus passes briefly through Indian-administered Kashmir and Ladakh. But Memon, the Islamabad-based expert, said that topography in the region means that the river passes through areas that are snowy, with little space for any canal diversion or agricultural projects. 'Plus, there is not enough quantum of water in the Indus in that area which would make it feasible for India to build any project,' he said. Indian hydroelectric projects on the remaining two rivers — the Kishenganga dam on the Jhelum, and Baglihar dam and the under-construction Ratle dam on the Chenab — have sparked concerns in Pakistan, which has protested against them under the IWT. Islamabad alleges that the projects could allow India to lower water levels into Pakistan, and that the Kishenganga dam could also change the course of the Jhelum. New Delhi rejects these allegations. In reality, experts say that as with the Indus, India lacks the ability to divert water from the Jhelum, too. The river passes through populated areas of Indian-administered Kashmir such as Baramulla and Jammu, Memon said. Any plans to construct a dam there could put the population at risk of inundation. The case of the Chenab is different. Its waters 'could be disturbed' by India, Memon said, though not in all seasons. The expert says that the river has several potential sites where dams could be built. But even if India built a dam, Memon said, it would not be able to store much water during the summer season, when the flow of water is at its peak, as that could risk flooding India's own population living near the project. To avoid that, India would need to allow water to flow downstream — into Pakistan. Anuttama Banerji, a New Delhi-based political analyst and water specialist, agreed that India cannot 'stop' the river flow, only regulate its release. 'The flow of the Chenab River can be regulated through dams and storage facilities, but India would need serious capital investment [for that]', she said. 'The threat won't materialise for Pakistan in the immediate term.' Still, warn many experts, just because India cannot at the moment stop water flow into Pakistan does not reduce either the value of the IWT as a weapon for New Delhi, or Islamabad's vulnerability in the future. 'Real pressure point' Dan Haines, environmental historian at University College London and author of the book Rivers Divided: Indus Basin Waters in the Making of India and Pakistan, warned that even symbolic disruptions of water flows by India could undermine Pakistan's agriculture. Agriculture accounts for almost 25 percent of Pakistan's gross domestic product (GDP) and employs more than 40 percent of the workforce. 'The Indian government announced the abeyance very quickly after the Pahalgam terrorist attack because it knows that water is a real pressure point for Pakistan. Water is very politically sensitive,' Haines said. In many ways, the recent fracture over river-sharing is precisely what the IWT had tried to insulate India-Pakistan relations from, say analysts. 'What India is attempting to do is to drag the issue of water squarely back into the domain of politics, which the treaty explicitly sought to separate,' Erum Sattar, lecturer in sustainable water management at Tufts University, told Al Jazeera. 'Given Pakistan's reliance on the waters of the Indus, it is absolutely the case that having the treaty hold in its present form is critical and vital to Pakistan.' And Pakistan needs to prepare for a future where India might have the ability to hurt it more than it currently can, using water, said Ahmed Irfan Aslam, a lawyer by practice, and a former federal minister who oversaw portfolios including law, justice, water, climate change, and investment. Aslam has also represented Pakistan in international water arbitration cases, including under the IWT. 'India does not have the capacity to stop rivers from flowing today. But that does not mean that they cannot acquire or develop that strategy over time,' he said. Memon, too, agreed that while India can't block the Chenab's flow into Pakistan in the summer, the dynamic changes when the weather does. 'The real concern, however, arises during winter when water flow reduces. And in case India builds storage or diversion projects, they could cause harm to Pakistan's winter crops, such as wheat,' he said. 'Additionally, if there is a lean water flow in the summer season, the dams can also store water during that time as well, which could hurt Pakistan's agriculture.' Shiraz Memon (no relation to Naseer), a former Pakistani representative on the Permanent Indus Commission for Pakistan, also said that he feared that future Indian projects on the Chenab could eventually hurt Pakistan. These projects — including the Ratle dam — 'could hold water between 50 to 60 days during winter, which could be very damaging to Pakistan's Punjab, which is entirely reliant on the Chenab River for its agricultural needs,' he told Al Jazeera. How prepared is Pakistan for an India block on water flows? At the moment, Pakistan has limited water storage capabilities. The country has three major multipurpose reservoirs – Mangla, Tarbela, and Chashma – as well as 19 barrages and 12 inter-river link canals. Together, these allow for the storage of just under 15 million acre-feet (MAF) of water, enough for approximately four weeks. International standards recommend storage equivalent to at least 120 days. To address the shortfall, Pakistan is building two major dams on the Indus River – Mohmand and Diamer-Bhasha – which are expected to increase capacity by another nine MAF upon their completion in 2028 and 2029, respectively. Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif recently acknowledged the need for expanded storage and pledged to act. 'The enemy has certain evil designs against Pakistan and wants to take steps against the water treaty. For that, the government has decided that we will build our water storage,' Sharif said on July 1. In effect, that sets up a race between India potentially developing the capability to actually block the flow of water into Pakistan if it wants to, and Pakistan building storage facilities big enough to reduce the risk of a forced water shortage. Still, no matter how much storage capacity Pakistan builds, it won't be enough to survive more than short-term disruptions to water flow, if India were to try to block rivers from entering into its neighbour's territory. Khurram Dastgir Khan, a former federal minister for foreign affairs and defence in Pakistan, said that India acquiring the capability to divert or store water in the medium to long term could push the region into war. 'India's threat is a genuine, existential concern,' Khan, a senior leader of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, told Al Jazeera. 'The Indus Basin is a civilisation. Flow of these waters has braced our environment and sustained development of Pakistan's culture, arts, agriculture, and industry. But PM Modi and his ministers have threatened repeatedly to stop every drop of water flowing into Pakistan.' What makes that threat particularly worrying for Pakistan, said Aslam, the other former minister, is the breakdown in any trust between the neighbours. 'What you have right now is a situation in which we as Pakistanis feel that good faith is no longer there on the other side of the border,' Aslam told Al Jazeera during an interview at his residence in Islamabad. But Aslam acknowledged that the sentiment might be shared across the border. 'Indians may have a similar view on this about Pakistan,' he conceded. A new Indus Waters Treaty? For now, both sides have adopted hard-line positions. New Delhi has rejected any reversal of the IWT suspension, while Pakistani officials have termed it an 'act of war' and accused India of weaponising water. But analysts — and some Pakistani politicians — still hold out hope for diplomacy, or international legal intervention. 'India, we hope, and we expect, will act like a responsible state,' said Aslam. 'And eventually, whatever issues there are, two neighbours will have to sit down to talk to each other and resolve.' Al Jazeera reached out to several Pakistani government officials – including the ministers for defence, information, and water – but received no responses about the government's plan of action for a scenario when India actually is able to — and does — block the flow of water. However, a senior military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, pointed out that Pakistan was already invoking international legal channels to make its case. Since 2016, Pakistan has been protesting India's hydroelectric projects on the Jhelum and Chenab at the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague. Last week, the PCA ruled that India's decision to hold the IWT in abeyance did not impact its authority to adjudicate the case. However, India has consistently refused to recognise the PCA's authority in the case, so it is unclear whether New Delhi will accept any verdict that emerges from that court. That effectively leaves Pakistan with two options: a military response, or a diplomatic solution. The senior military official said that for Pakistan, the Indus waters were a 'lifeline for the 250 million people of the country'. 'We see this as an act of war, and if there is any action taken by the Indians which we deem harmful to our interest, we will respond,' the official told Al Jazeera. 'Any act of war authorises us to deliver an appropriate, legitimate and befitting response at a time and place of our choosing.' Banerji, also a former fellow at the Washington-based Stimson Center, said any military response would be unwise given that the recent conflict has already reduced space for dialogue. 'I believe Pakistan should also reassess the treaty and see where it can derive benefits from a modified treaty, as that can enable the treaty to acquire a new form that is mutually beneficial to both sides,' she said. Mustafa, the King's College London geography professor, said Pakistan could use India's decision to walk away from the IWT to also seek a renegotiated agreement — including by staking a claim to some of the water from the eastern rivers that New Delhi currently controls fully. Aslam said that although direct negotiations between India and Pakistan remain the most effective way forward, the current climate makes dialogue unlikely. 'As a measure of last resort, I think the [Pakistan] government has made its position very clear on this,' he said. 'If Pakistan is deprived of water, all options are there on the table, including the consideration to use military solutions.'
The Guardian
26-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Are we witnessing the death of international law?
In late April, terrorists killed 26 civilians in the Indian town of Pahalgam, located in the mountainous border region of Kashmir. India swiftly blamed Pakistan for the attack, launched missile strikes towards it and announced that it was suspending the Indus waters treaty, effectively threatening to cut off three-quarters of Pakistan's water supply. Ahmad Irfan Aslam, a seasoned international lawyer who, until last year, was Pakistan's minister for law and justice, water and natural resources, climate change and investments, watched the news unfold with a creeping sense of horror. India was raising the possibility that it could turn off the tap for 250 million people. This would violate not only the treaty, but also international laws around the equitable use of water resources. Colleagues and friends approached Aslam for guidance about what could be done. That's when it struck him: 'I had this scary realisation that there isn't much one can do today,' he told me. 'We have witnessed a sudden erosion of multilateral institutions, of institutional norms. Everything seems uncertain.' Even if Pakistan were to bring a complaint to one of the institutions created to settle disputes between states – the UN security council and general assembly, the international court of justice (ICJ) or the permanent court of arbitration – whatever decision that resulted would almost certainly not be respected. 'International law has always depended on the good faith of nation states,' Aslam said. 'And that good faith has eroded.' In 2024, Aslam had experienced a similarly unsettling feeling in The Hague, where he represented Pakistan at the ICJ, in a proceeding about Israel's ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories in the West Bank. 'Israel's occupation is unlawful and unlawfulness must have consequences,' he told the court. There were 52 countries participating in the proceedings, and when Aslam spoke with many of his colleagues, 'there was an acute realisation that none of this is actually going to change anything on the ground'. Perhaps what they told the judges would mean something to future historians, but their words would do nothing to prevent the immediate suffering of Palestinians. 'No matter what court you approach, you are not going to get justice,' he said. 'And civilians are caught up in this web of geopolitics that is not of their own making.' Over the past decade, key institutions upholding the international order have been diminished, crippled or compromised. The recent US withdrawal from a vast array of international organisations and agreements – the Paris climate accords, the World Health Organization, the UN human rights council – has further damaged the system; US sanctions on the international criminal court (ICC) have undermined the court's credibility and created serious financial obstacles to its investigations of war crimes in Ukraine and Gaza. The UN security council has been deadlocked for well over a decade, thanks to the veto power of its permanent members. Trump's threats to occupy Greenland and Canada and to seize the Panama canal have further undermined the already frayed edifice of international law. 'Even raising the possibility of these clearly illegal actions does harm to the legal norm, because it makes them thinkable,' said Oona Hathaway, professor of international law at Yale. Days after the US followed Israel in conducting unlawful airstrikes on nuclear sites in Iran, Hathaway argued that Trump's actions threatened 'to reshape the global legal order, transforming it from one governed by law to one governed by might'. But the erosion of international law began long before Trump first took power in 2017. The relevance, and even the very existence, of international law has been up for debate since the moment it emerged almost two centuries ago. Its champions argue that it is the bulwark against another great war, a restraint against criminality and mass violence. Its critics argue that, far from shielding the world from the worst crimes, it has instead protected states by providing them with a language with which to justify their wrongs. International lawyers are themselves divided over whether their discipline is alive and well, in hibernation, in its death throes, or long ago deceased, a 'moral ghost' that hovers over the world map. Wandering round The Hague, it can feel less like a city and more like a collection of symbols. To walk through its streets is to repeatedly encounter the ruins of prior attempts to establish world peace. The building that once housed the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia sits just in front of the international centre for the prosecution of the crime of aggression against Ukraine. The Iran-US claims tribunal, set up in the aftermath of the Tehran hostage crisis of 1979 and still going, is a 10-minute walk up the road, while the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is headquartered just a few metres away. These institutions have little to do with one another in terms of law, but being located together in The Hague gives them a 'patina of legitimacy', as one international lawyer told me. The ICC is located in the north-east corner of the city, just down the road from the detention centre where its defendants are housed. (Current occupants include the former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte and the Central African rebel leader Alfred Yekatom.) The closer one gets to the Peace Palace, the seat of the ICJ, the more placid and verdant the city becomes. These institutions are physical embodiments of the discipline known as 'international law', though scholars tend to disagree on what international law actually is. In place of an answer, one is confronted with a series of metaphors: one lawyer told me that it is 'like gravity: you don't see it, but it's there'. Others have compared it to spelling in the English language (the rules can seem made up); to pornography (you know it when you see it); to a body of water (it does not stand still); to a comedy (it can defy reason); to a tragedy (all too often, everyone loses). The novelist Shirley Hazzard once described it rather more cynically, as a 'beaut racket'. Its constituent materials, according to ICJ statute, include treaties, conventions, customs and cases, as well as 'general principles of law recognised by civilised nations' and 'teachings of the most highly qualified' experts. But to speak of international law as merely a set of rules and agreements is to elide its function as the 'lingua franca of the international system', and as a means of expressing the belief that perpetrators of global crimes should be punished just as domestic offenders are, and (more often) of expressing incredulity when they are not. (International law has become the vernacular of the 'educated middle classes', as the LSE professor of law Gerry Simpson put it. 'When I go to dinner parties, people speak international law to me all the time,' he told me.) To speak of 'international law' is to conjure up a particular set of images: the German high command awaiting sentencing at Nuremberg; war criminals and genocidaires on trial in The Hague. These are episodes of international criminal law, the youngest and most fragile branch of international law, and the one that is most fiercely argued over by politicians, the media and the public. Today, there is a growing sense in the field that international criminal law is a failed project, 'a dead man walking'. Few of the lawyers I spoke with were willing to defend it without caveat. 'The gap between the aspirations of international criminal law and the reality for people on the ground is greater and greater,' said Adil Haque, a law professor at Rutgers University. 'And that is a problem for the law, because law is supposed to achieve things in the real world.' The creation of the ICC in 1998 was the realisation of the most romantic aspirations of international law: holding perpetrators of emblematic crimes to account whenever their own nations failed to do so. The court opened its doors at a unique and perhaps unreplicable moment in international relations, when the world's powers were still enjoying the afterglow of the end of the cold war. 'In retrospect, it was this weird period of history where a lot of the sovereignty and security concerns that big powers have were somewhat reduced,' said David Bosco, a journalist and academic who has spent decades covering the court. 'That allowed for a project like the ICC to get off the ground in a way that it would not have in any other period.' That period turned out to be short-lived. The ICC, which has an annual operating budget of approximately €200m, could never fully live up to the aspirations that ushered it into being. In its 23-year history, it has only delivered 11 convictions, all of which have been for crimes committed on the African continent. (Because of the court's perceived focus on trying African defendants, member states of the African Union have repeatedly threatened to withdraw from the Rome statute, the ICC's founding treaty.) 'There is a neocolonial aura about [the ICC] which is hard to shake,' the Finnish legal scholar and former diplomat Martti Koskenniemi told me. In his view, the court was a product of the 'liberal hubris' of the 1990s, the result of a system that had been seduced by its own idealism. Since its founding, the ICC has been accused of being a vehicle for victor's justice, a 'fake court' in the eyes of its detractors. The recent arrest of Duterte, while a significant victory for the court, will be challenged on the grounds that the Philippines formally withdrew from the Rome statute in 2019. (The ICC pre-trial chamber has said that its investigation into Duterte's drug war crimes only pertained to actions committed prior to that date.) And while the court's arrest warrants for Russian president Vladimir Putin and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu are important symbolic gestures, the chance that either indictment ever results in a trial is virtually zero. Russia and Israel have joined the US, Syria and China in refusing to become a state party to the Rome statute, effectively denying the court authority to try its citizens. (Earlier this year, Hungary notified the UN that it would be joining this club, by withdrawing from the ICC while hosting Netanyahu in Budapest.) The US's commitment to undermining the court runs deep. A month after the court was officially founded, Congress passed a law known as the 'Hague Invasion Act', giving the president the power to use 'all means necessary' to release a US government official detained by the ICC. When, in 2017, ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda attempted to open an investigation into atrocities allegedly committed by US personnel in Afghanistan, she was denied a visa to enter the US, and the court was threatened with economic sanctions. The investigation was ultimately dropped as a result of pressure from the Trump administration. Bensouda was more recently tasked with investigating alleged genocide in Palestine, an assignment for which she faced 'direct threats' to her person and family. The high-profile arrest warrants for Putin and Netanyahu may have raised the court's profile, but they have also underscored its impotence and attracted potentially fatal countermeasures from the US. 'Paradoxically,' the international lawyer Chantal Meloni told me, 'the minute the court shows that it has teeth might be the end of the court.' The criticisms of international law are familiar and, in some sense, impossible to deny: that it is too weak, that it is selectively applied, that it is merely an extension of state power. 'We are all prisoners of this horizontal system, where states have to keep each other in check, and that will inevitably fall subject to politicisation,' Yusra Suedi, a lecturer at the University of Manchester, told me. It is essentially an opt-in system: weak states that flout its directives are called pariahs or rogues; powerful states that do so are called hegemons. For critics of the field, the problem is not just that law doesn't stop wars or protect civilians, but also that it offers a vocabulary for states to justify the unchecked use of force. Breaches are not the exception but the rule. For instance, international humanitarian law restricts the use of certain kinds of weapons, such as cluster bombs, that are 'indiscriminate by nature, capable of causing harm without distinguishing between combatants and civilians'. That did not stop Israel, which first ratified the convention on certain conventional weapons in 1995, from deploying cluster bombs against a civilian population in 2006, during the Lebanon war. (Israel, like the US, Russia, Iran and China, refused to sign the 2008 convention on cluster munitions.) More than 1,000 people were killed, approximately one-third of whom were children. The Israeli military claimed that the use of cluster bombs was not a violation of international law, because they were focused on military targets and because the population of Beirut's southern suburbs, an area called Dahiya, had been warned of the attack in advance. It was during that conflict that Israeli forces developed what is now known as the 'Dahiya doctrine', which permits the use of 'disproportionate' force against civilian population centres in certain circumstances. The attack on Dahiya was a blatant violation of what is known as the 'principle of proportionality' in international law, which holds that civilians may not be attacked if the result is 'excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated'. The UN human rights council formed a commission to look into the event, which concluded that 'there was no justification' for the use of cluster bombs. Every scholar who laments the waning of international law will have their own moment when the rot set in. In Koskenniemi's view, it came in the 1960s when its original goals of peace and justice started to be displaced by the administrative and managerial imperatives of globalisation. For the Israeli legal scholar Itamar Mann, Dahiya felt like the beginning of the end of international law as a credible system for preventing atrocities. 'They weren't just ignoring the rule: they were invoking it for the very purposes that it was supposed to limit or control,' he said. By attempting to justify a legally unjustified action in the language of international law, Israel made a mockery of the spirit and letter of the law. 'In general, that was the moment when the idea that an entire neighbourhood can be eliminated, or close to that, came on the radar,' said Mann. As we spoke about the condition of international law writ large, he slipped into the past tense: 'It was a way of challenging brute uses of force, and that is no longer there.' Invocations of international law as cover for violations of its own order have contributed to perceptions that the discipline is in decline. Russia, for example, took pains to offer legal arguments for its invasion of Ukraine in 2014. In a document seeking to justify its 7 October attack on Israel, Hamas referred to an ICJ opinion about the construction of a wall on occupied Palestinian land and called for states to 'uphold their responsibilities towards the international law'. Meanwhile, Israeli politicians have frequently invoked international law as a shield and an alibi for the continuation of the war in Gaza. It is either a sign that something is deeply wrong with the international system, or a sign that it is working as it should, that a state like North Korea took the trouble to accuse Israel of committing an 'unpardonable crime against humanity' by attacking Iran. Gerry Simpson began his career as a believer in international law and its power, and wrote articles making institutional proposals for new committees and the like. Now he sees that approach as misguided. Part of the discipline's problem, he argues, is that international law, like any belief system, is at its core merely a collection of words, and those words have lost touch with the realities they are meant to describe: 'Does anyone think 'serious violations of the laws of war' captures the essence of bodily and mental harm caused by explosive devices or torture?' he writes in his recent book, The Sentimental Life of International Law. 'Many people are trying to hold on to a legal system that is decreasingly available to us,' said Monica Hakimi, a former state department lawyer who is now professor of international law at Columbia. 'You don't want to just throw up your hands and give up on the international legal norms that have forestalled massive wars and protected individual rights. But I think we are not quite thinking through the kinds of compromises that we will need to make if we are to stop the most dangerous trend lines that we're seeing.' A reckoning with the failures of the field and the sclerosis of its institutions, several lawyers told me, is long overdue. 'It would be a foolish person who would say that the UN, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as they are currently structured are fit for purpose to take us through to the end of the century,' said Sir Daniel Bethlehem, the former legal adviser to the UK Foreign Office. 'I cannot imagine getting out of the quagmire of Sudan, or DRC, or Israel-Gaza, or Ukraine, by simply putting one foot in front of the other.' He has advocated for a long-term rethinking of the form and content of the international system. If we are to find our way out of the current crisis, he argues, 'there is an urgent need to re-engineer, to reconfigure'. For true believers in the field, there is no crisis in international law. Dire Tladi, a widely respected South African legal scholar who, last year, was appointed as a judge at the ICJ, assured me that international law was not in decline. It continued to exist as a 'neutral set of rules that is supposed to apply to relations between states, and it's supposed to apply without 'fear or favour'', he said. When I pointed out that the words 'supposed to' were bearing a lot of weight in that formulation, Tladi responded: 'Voilà.' Tladi is clear-eyed about the limitations of his work. In his legal opinions, he has taken a stridently realist tone. Last May, in a a declaration regarding South Africa's suit against Israel for alleged violations of the genocide convention, he wrote that 'there are no more words to describe the horrors in Gaza', and explained that the court had ordered Israel to halt its military operations and had demanded that Hamas release the hostages. 'But,' he concluded, 'the court is only a court!' His own words, and those of his colleagues, could only do so much. The law was issuing directives and making judgments, but they were falling on closed ears. No advisory opinion can make a tank reverse course. The point, Tladi argues, is that what we are witnessing today is not the failure of international law but rather the failure of international politics. 'The law is there,' he said, but 'gaps in international law have often been used as a basis for non-accountability'. And even where gaps do not exist – 'There's no debate about the fact that you are not allowed to commit genocide,' Tladi said – international politics and power have frequently blunted the force of international law. 'You cannot ignore the influence of power on lawmaking,' he said. (As a sitting judge, Tladi could not talk about ongoing cases.) When I spoke to Raji Sourani, the director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, who fled Gaza with his family after their home was blown up in late October 2023, he offered a similarly strident defence of international law. He rattled off a list of victories: the ICJ had acknowledged that a plausible genocide was unfolding in Gaza and had issued six provisional measures commanding Israel to restrict its use of force and uphold the genocide convention; the ICC had issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant; almost 100 Israeli soldiers are being investigated for war crimes in at least 14 countries under the principle of universal jurisdiction. 'The problem is not international law,' Sourani said. 'We made the best use of it that we could, for the sake of the rule of law and the dignity of man, and to protect civilians.' The problem, he said, lay with states who suggested that international law need not be consistently applied. He and his Palestinian colleagues 'were very happy when they talked about the Ukrainian right to self-determination and independence', Sourani told me. Those same standards need to be applied everywhere, he said. 'You cannot be real democracies when you are selective in deciding to whom international law applies.' For Leila Sadat, a former ICC special adviser and prolific scholar, the critics of international law bear some responsibility for the crippled state of the field. By constantly raising the question of its relevance and even its very existence, they opened the system up to cynicism, attack and manipulation. When she started working on the ICC, she desperately wanted to make it more effective. But, she said, 'It never occurred to me to challenge the entire concept that individuals should be held accountable for the commission of mass atrocities.' For Sourani, debates over international law are anything but academic. 'We believe in justice, dignity of man, the rule of law, human rights,' he said. 'These are not just words. These are the lives of people, the blood and pain and suffering of people.' Earlier that day, he had managed to call a friend who is still in Gaza. The friend said he could no longer look his wife and children in the eyes, because he could not find anything to feed them. 'He said to me: 'Raji, I have a dream. I want to die.'' Where does international law go from here? The field is cyclical, Suedi told me. 'Sometimes it takes terrible events to awaken humanity to the depths of our actions, prompting us to reflect, redeem ourselves, and to go back to our fundamental values.' We are now in a period of downturn: international law will not disappear, but its institutions will probably continue to lose credibility and their rulings will carry less weight. The degradation of international law will be accompanied by a parallel erosion of the rule of law within states. 'It's easy to take potshots at international law, it's easy to say that none of it is enforceable, that it's all a joke,' Sadat told me. 'We are now seeing what happens when a president [Trump] attacks domestic law. All law depends on a system of good faith, including national law.' China has slowly begun to take up the role that the US once played in international institutions, recasting the law in its image. While the US has leaned away from multilateral forums, China is leaning in. 'They go to all the meetings of the ICC; they participate in the system,' said Sadat. In the absence of US participation, she predicted, 'a China-led international legal system is what we are likely to get'. A China-led international law will probably be one in which the protection of human rights and the distribution of aid are downgraded, and respect for state borders elevated. 'The jealous protection of state sovereignty' is the principle around which Chinese foreign policy revolves, said Julian Ku, a professor of law at Hofstra University. 'And the UN is a forum for them to market this view to other developing nations – they want to make common cause with nations who are sick of being lectured by Europeans, Americans, by NGOs.' ('It is no surprise that authoritarian nations in Africa prefer China as a hegemon,' said Hakimi.) So far, however, the Chinese-led international order looks like it will be no more consistent than the version that preceded it. 'Everybody is walking in different directions: China is very interested in sovereignty and territorial integrity, but they are not doing a lot to help Ukraine,' said Ku. 'Turkey has been occupying Cyprus pretty much for 60 years, and people just kind of got used to it.' China's UN representative recently said that US strikes on Iran had damaged the country's credibility in international negotiations, and Chinese state media chided the US for playing 'power politics' at the expense of international law. Over the next few years, it is likely that the thick layer of international treaties and agreements that has governed the past several decades will continue to erode. In late June, Indian home affairs minister Amit Shah announced that his country will 'never' restore the Indus waters treaty, and that 'Pakistan will be starved of water that it has been getting unjustifiably'. Yet Ahmad, the former Pakistani minister, told me that despite the current state of his field, he remains a hopeless optimist, at least in the long term. 'To every force, there is a counter force,' he said. 'For every genocide happening, there will be counter litigation to hold those accountable.' Every proceeding must result in a judgment. 'Will those judgments be enforced? No. Will that mean that the system has collapsed? No. Those judgments may be unimportant and irrelevant today, but they will come up again, and they matter.' Only a crisis, Ahmad believes, will compel humanity to come together, to redevelop global institutions, and to re-engage with international law. The crisis that might ultimately bring about a re-invigoration of international law, he told me, is not Israel-Palestine, or Russia-Ukraine, or the threatened annexation of Greenland, or the erosion of multilateral institutions. It is climate change. 'Over the next seven years, international law will respond to climate change, and that will trickle down to other aspects of the field – trade investment first, and then eventually to things like territorial integrity and ICC proceedings.' Last year, an unprecedented number of states participated in climate crisis proceedings at the ICJ, and the judges are now working on an advisory opinion on state obligations to protect the environment. 'If you read the scientific reports, they clearly tell us that we are not winning [the fight against climate breakdown],' Tladi told me. 'Either the law is not sufficient, or the law is not being applied.' The field of international law has always been a dynamic system, and it has to evolve alongside the world that it seeks to govern. 'International law will be fine, but it will reflect the state of the world,' Tladi said. 'So the question is, what will the world look like?' Listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.
Al Jazeera
22-06-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
India says it will ‘never' restore Indus Waters Treaty with Pakistan
India will never restore the Indus Waters Treaty with neighbouring Pakistan, and the water flowing there will be diverted for internal use, says federal Home Minister Amit Shah. India put into 'abeyance' its participation in the 1960 treaty, which governs the usage of the Indus River system, after 26 people were killed in Indian-administered Kashmir in April, in what New Delhi described as an act of terror backed by Pakistan. Pakistan denied involvement in the incident, which led to days of fighting between the two nuclear powers – their worst military escalation in decades, bringing them to the brink of another war. Despite a ceasefire agreed upon by the two nations last month, Shah said his government would not restore the treaty, which guaranteed water access for 80 percent of Pakistan's farms through three rivers originating in India. 'It will never be restored,' Shah told The Times of India newspaper in an interview on Saturday. 'We will take water that was flowing to Pakistan to Rajasthan by constructing a canal. Pakistan will be starved of water that it has been getting unjustifiably,' he added, referring to the northwestern Indian desert state. The transboundary water agreement allows the two countries to share water flowing from the Indus basin, giving India control of three eastern Himalayan rivers – Ravi, Sutlej, and Beas – while Pakistan got control of the three western rivers – Jhelum, Chenab, and Indus. The treaty also established the India-Pakistan Indus Commission, which is supposed to resolve any problems that arise. So far, it has survived previous armed conflicts and near-constant tensions between India and Pakistan over the past 65 years. However, the comments from Shah, the most powerful minister in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's cabinet, have dimmed Islamabad's hopes for negotiations on the treaty in the near term. Pakistan has not yet responded to Shah's comments. But it has said in the past that the treaty has no provision for one side to unilaterally pull back, and that any blocking of river water flowing to Pakistan will be considered 'an act of war'. 'The treaty can't be amended, nor can it be terminated by any party unless both agree,' Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said last month. Islamabad is also exploring a legal challenge to India's decision to hold the treaty in abeyance under international law. Legal experts told Al Jazeera in April that the treaty cannot be unilaterally suspended, and that it can only be modified by mutual agreement between the parties. 'India has used the word 'abeyance', and there is no such provision to 'hold it in abeyance' in the treaty,' Ahmer Bilal Soofi, a Pakistani lawyer, told Al Jazeera. 'It also violates customary international laws relating to upper and lower riparian, where the upper riparian cannot stop the water promise for the lower riparian.' Anuttama Banerji, a political analyst based in New Delhi, told Al Jazeera in April that the treaty might continue, but not in its present form. 'Instead, it will be up for 'revision', 'review' and 'modification' – all three meaning different things – considering newer challenges such as groundwater depletion and climate change were not catered for in the original treaty,' Banerji said.
Al Arabiya
21-06-2025
- Politics
- Al Arabiya
India will ‘never' restore Pakistan water treaty: Minister
New Delhi will 'never' reinstate a key water treaty it suspended with Pakistan over deadly violence in India-administered Kashmir, the interior minister said in an interview published Saturday. India halted the agreement following an April attack on civilians which it accused Pakistan of backing, a charge denied by Islamabad and one which was followed by days of fighting between the two foes. Despite a ceasefire holding, India's interior minister said his government would not restore the treaty which governs river water critical to parched Pakistan. 'It will never be restored,' interior minister Amit Shah told the Times of India. 'We will take the water that was flowing to Pakistan to Rajasthan (state) by constructing a canal. Pakistan will be starved of water that it has been getting unjustifiably,' he added. The 1960 Indus Water Treaty gave India and Pakistan three Himalayan rivers each and the right to hydropower and irrigation resources. It established the India-Pakistan Indus Commission, which is supposed to resolve any problems that arise. Islamabad last month said the treaty was a 'no-go area', after New Delhi announced it would maintain its suspension following the ceasefire. 'The treaty can't be amended, nor can it be terminated by any party unless both agree,' Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said. Halting the water agreement was one of a series of tit-for-tat diplomatic measures taken by both countries in the immediate aftermath of the Kashmir attack. New Delhi has not made public any evidence of Islamabad's alleged involvement in the April 22 killing by gunmen of mostly Indian tourists. During the four days of fighting which followed in May, more than 70 people were killed in missile, drone and artillery fire. It was the worst standoff between the nuclear-armed neighbors since 1999.
