The 2026 ICJ Election: The UK Returns, but Who is Out?

On 3 November 2026, the UN Security Council and General Assembly met concurrently to fill five vacancies on the International Court of Justice (ICJ). This was the first election since 2017 in which  no seat held by a non-P5 member of WEOG (Western European and Others Group) fell vacant. In 2020, the term of Giorgio Gaja (Italy) was ending, and in 2023, so were those of Hilary Charlesworth (Australia) and Joan Donoghue (United States). In this election, for the nine-year term beginning 2027, the only WEOG vacancy was the seat held by Ronny Abraham (France), while the other four fell to the Asia-Pacific group (Dalveer Bhandari from India, leaving; Mahmoud Daifallah Hmoud from Jordan, seeking re-election), Africa (Phoebe Okowa from Kenya, seeking re-election), and Latin America (Leonardo Nemer Caldeira Brant from Brazil, leaving). Assuming that France would retain the seat vacated by Abraham, in keeping with the conventional distribution of seats among regional groups and the P5, the UK’s nomination of Dapo Akande, the Nigerian-British professor, therefore raised the possibility of displacing a candidate from another regional group.

Akande and Ambassador François Alabrune (both from P5 countries and WEOG) had the most nominations, with 43 and 40 respectively, followed by Singaporean Ambassador Rena Lee, who received nominations from 33 states across regional groups. Seeking re-election, Okowa (Kenya) and Hmoud had 26 and 15 nominations respectively. The number of nominations was partly reflected in the first-round voting of both organs, in which Lee (151 in the Assembly and 13 in the Council), Alabrune (146 in the Assembly and 13 in the Council), and Akande (129 in the Assembly and 11 in the Council) were the top three picks. Hmoud secured majorities (106 in the Assembly and 10 in the Council), but Okowa, despite securing a majority in the Assembly (117 votes), fell 2 votes short in the Council (6 votes). Meanwhile, Marcelo Vázquez-Bermúdez, the Ecuadorian Ambassador who is also a member of the International Law Commission and Special Rapporteur for General Principles of Law, secured the required majority in the Council (9 votes) but not in the Assembly (73 votes). As Article 10 of the ICJ Statute requires candidates to obtain an absolute majority in both organs to be elected, neither Okowa nor Vázquez-Bermúdez could therefore secure the fifth seat.

First-round voting in the Assembly:

Lee 151

Alabrune 146

Akande 129

Okowa 117

Hmoud 106

Jin-Hyun Paik (Republic of Korea) 92

Charles Chernor Jalloh (Sierra Leone) 82

Vázquez-Bermúdez 73

Luz del Carmen Ibáñez Carranza (Peru) 5

First-round voting in the Council:

Lee 13

Alabrune 13

Akande 11

Hmoud 10

Vázquez-Bermúdez 9

Paik 7

Okowa 6

Jalloh 5

Ibáñez Carranza 0

Lee and Hmoud both secured the required majorities in the two organs, meaning that the Asia-Pacific group would retain four seats on the Court, alongside the two incumbents, Iwasawa Yuji and Xue Hanqin. The extent of overlapping support for the region’s candidates is also noteworthy. In the Security Council, each member had five votes, and Lee and Hmoud received 13 and 10 votes respectively. Since there were only 15 members, at least 8 (13+10-15) must have voted for both. In the General Assembly, the combined votes for Lee, Hmoud and Paik amounted to 349. Of the 191 states that cast valid ballots, at least 79 ([349-191]/2) must therefore have voted for two or more of the three Asian candidates. These are minimum figures, since the ballots were secret and the actual overlap may have been higher. Although states may have supported these candidates on the basis of their individual qualifications rather than regional considerations, the figures suggest that there was no widespread reluctance to see the Asia-Pacific group retain its existing representation, even with two additional seats at stake in this election. While the British and French candidates also commanded considerable support, the remaining question was who would be left out.

At first sight, the Council appeared to want a Latin American to fill the vacancy left by the Brazilian judge, but the second round suggests that Vázquez-Bermúdez’s lead owed more to a divided African vote. With one seat left, his vote fell to 3, while Okowa and Charles Chernor Jalloh (Sierra Leone) together took 10 of the Council’s 15 votes. The Council was therefore not opposed to a further African judge, but was not determined to re-elect Okowa. The Assembly, by contrast, clearly preferred Okowa to the other candidates. She received 117 votes against Vázquez-Bermúdez’s 73 in the first round, and led again in the second with 89, against 40 for Paik and 30 each for Vázquez-Bermúdez and Jalloh.

The vote split among the remaining candidates, however, meant that Okowa could not convert a comfortable first-round majority into a second-round one. Before the third round, Sierra Leone withdrew Jalloh and gave full support to Okowa, with its Permanent Representative, Michael Imran Kanu, contending that Africa has more than a quarter of the UN’s members yet holds only three of fifteen seats, and that a divided vote risked losing even the one open seat. Vázquez-Bermúdez and Paik also withdrew, and Okowa won 183 votes in the Assembly and thirteen in the Council, with two abstentions.

Latin America, which had no incumbent, lost a seat. Not only the Council seemed unsure whether to prefer Vázquez-Bermúdez, but the Assembly’s voting also suggests limited concern for Latin American representation. The result is that the Court returns to five WEOG judges and judges of all P5 nationalities, including one with an African background who in 2017 wrote in this blog that some might question whether a judge of each P5 nationality should always sit. With Akande (Oxford) and Okowa (QMUL) elected, this will be the second time that two UK-based academics have sat on the bench, as Christopher Greenwood (LSE) and James Crawford (Cambridge) did a decade ago. Akande will also be the second Oxford Chichele Professor on the bench after Humphrey Waldock, in line with the tradition that British judges are all university professors, Gerald Fitzmaurice excepted.

For Latin America and the Caribbean, the result is arguably historic. For the first time in the Court’s 80-year history, the region will have fewer than two seats: only one, held by Juan Manuel Gómez Robledo of Mexico. While the ICJ, unlike the Security Council, has no formally prescribed allocation of seats among regional groups, its composition has historically tended to mirror the regional distribution of seats in the Security Council, with member States generally respecting the expectation that seats would remain within their regional groups. This convention, rather than any rule, has provided a degree of continuity in the Court’s regional representation since 1970 (Marcel Gross and Nick Gonzalez). The 2017 election marked the first significant departure from this pattern, when the UK lost its longstanding seat and the Asia-Pacific Group gained a fourth judge. Now the election marks a second such departure. The UK has regained a seat, restoring the previous P5-WEOG distribution, but at the expense of the GRULAC (Latin American and Caribbean Group).

If the loss of the GRULAC appears to draw less attention than the loss of the UK in 2017, this may be partly because one seat for less than one tenth of the world’s population may look proportionate numerically. The region’s contribution to international law, however, is hard to overstate. As the late Cançado Trindade suggested, Latin American legal doctrine contributed in the twentieth century above all to the prohibition of the use of force, peaceful settlement of disputes, the juridical equality of States, compulsory international jurisdiction and individuals’ direct access to international justice:

‘It is thus relevant to rescue the Latin American legacy to contemporary international law, and to the construction of the new jus gentium of the twenty-first century.’ (The Contribution of Latin American Legal Doctrine to the Progressive Development of International Law)

This election illustrates that, with only fifteen seats on the ICJ, maintaining the customary representation of all P5 nationalities, the conventional allocation of five WEOG judges, or both, inevitably constrains the representation available to other regional groups. Although Asia retained both its open seats and now holds four in total, it remains underrepresented by population. Africa, by contrast, is underrepresented by number of states. Neither group can be said to be fully served by the current distribution.

However, it is worth recalling that Article 9 of the Statute requires that ‘in the body as a whole the representation of the main forms of civilization and of the principal legal systems of the world should be assured’, rather than a proportional reflection of member States. The question is therefore whether geographical composition tracks the diversity of the ICJ. Dire Tladi, writing before his election to the Court, observes that in the Chagos advisory opinion, all the individual opinions asserting the peremptory character of self-determination were appended by judges from the South. In the Nuclear Weapons advisory opinion, not a single judge from the developed world, or from any nuclear weapon State, voted against the dispositif finding no comprehensive and universal prohibition on the use of nuclear weapons. From these he concludes that the disproportionate representation of persons from developed, powerful States marginalises States of the South and undermines sovereign equality:

‘Quite apart from the value inherent in representation, we ought to not forget that all of us are products of cultural influence, background, education and, in general, our experience. Whether we care to admit or not, our legal positions are also driven by normative and policy considerations, which are significantly shaped by our backgrounds.’ (Representation, Inequality, Marginalization, and International Law-Making: The Case of the International Court of Justice and the International Law Commission)

Background, of course, is broader than nationality, which is only one part of it. Dapo Akande will sit as a British nominee, yet he qualified in Nigeria, has worked for many years as consultant to the African Union Commission on issues such as the immunity of heads of State and the review of the ICC Statute, and has appeared as counsel and advocate for African States before the Court. Can a British judge with Nigerian legal and professional experience contribute to the representation of African legal traditions? Or can a judge from a particular country meaningfully represent several legal traditions through their professional and intellectual background? The same question may be asked of Okowa, who is Kenyan but has taught in the UK for many years. For States of the South, however, formal representation matters in itself, as part of being treated as equal participants, which is what sovereign equality promises. The Statute itself suggests that nationality is tied to perceived fairness. Article 3 bars two judges of the same nationality, and Article 31 allows a party without a judge of its nationality to appoint one ad hoc. Representation has different dimensions, but the underlying aim should be the same: to make the Court fair to all States, rather than reproducing the past in which international law served as an instrument of the powerful, and that this justice is seen to be done.