Former international relations minister Naledi Pandor said without confronting material complicity, the initiative risked becoming “pleasant, but ineffectual”. Photo: Hasina Kathrada
When the Hague Group convened its first public African meeting in Cape Town earlier this week, it did so as a coalition of Global South states seeking to revive the enforcement of international law in the face of Israel’s genocide on Gaza.
Co-chaired by South Africa and Colombia, the group brings together states from Africa, Latin America and Asia that argue the paralysis of multilateral institutions has enabled systematic impunity. Yet the gathering unfolded against a backdrop that exposed a central tension confronting the initiative.
It was here that former international relations minister Naledi Pandor’s intervention cut most sharply. Welcoming the formation of the group, Pandor cautioned that without confronting material complicity, the initiative risked becoming “pleasant, but ineffectual”.
Her warning would soon find concrete expression in trade data showing a sharp rise in South African coal exports to Israel, even as Pretoria presses its genocide case at The Hague.
The Hague Group was established in January by South Africa, Colombia, Bolivia, Cuba, Honduras, Namibia, Malaysia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.
Drawn from three continents with histories shaped by colonial domination, the group has committed to implementing existing international law through domestic measures, including halting arms transfers, denying port access for weapons shipments and enforcing arrest warrants against individuals accused of war crimes should they enter member states’ territories.
That ambition reflects mounting frustration with the failure of global institutions to constrain Israeli conduct in Gaza. Speakers described a system in which legal norms are applied selectively, allowing powerful states and their allies to evade accountability.
South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice was repeatedly cited as a turning point that challenged this exceptionalism, even as subsequent diplomatic pressure against Pretoria underscored the costs of acting alone.
From the outset, organisers framed the Hague Group as an attempt to overcome that vulnerability through collective action. By coordinating enforcement, they argue, states may generate enough political ballast to resist unilateral retaliation, including sanctions, tariffs and diplomatic isolation. Several participating countries have already faced punitive measures for positions perceived as hostile to Western interests, lending urgency to the experiment.
But as discussion in Cape Town made clear, collective credibility depends on consistency. During the question-and-answer session, participants pressed panellists on South Africa’s continued export of coal and other strategic commodities to Israel, arguing that legal commitments lose force if material supply chains remain intact.
Pandor acknowledged the point, noting that coal was precisely the kind of pressure point where activism and organised labour had historically forced political change and said she had been engaging trade unions on the issue.
The scale of that contradiction is stark. In the three months to October, South Africa shipped just over 660 000 tonnes of coal to Israel, enough to fill roughly six large bulk carriers, marking the highest quarterly total since 2017.
In the following three months to November, exports climbed again, rising 87 percent year on year to about 474 000 tonnes, according to South African Revenue Service data.
Taken together, the figures point to a rapid consolidation of South Africa’s role in Israel’s energy supply chain at a time when other exporters have withdrawn.
Analysts tracking seaborne coal flows estimate that South Africa could supply more than half of Israel’s imported coal by 2025, following Colombia’s decision to halt exports earlier this year. The surge has been independently corroborated by industry data and international reporting.
These figures became publicly available in mid-December, shortly after the Hague Group’s Cape Town meeting, lending force to the critique raised in the room. They underline the contradiction between South Africa’s role as a legal challenger at the ICJ and its position as a growing energy supplier to Israel at a moment when Gaza’s infrastructure has been systematically destroyed.
Pandor’s argument extended beyond coal. Drawing on her experience in government, she described an international environment marked by declining political morality, where economic imperatives routinely override commitments to human rights.
Governments, trade unions and even civil society organisations, she warned, risk becoming hostages to the pursuit of prosperity, losing their attachment to justice and dignity in the process. In such a context, courage would be required not only to speak but to disobey.
Her critique turned inward. Pandor expressed alarm at what she described as a retreat from academic freedom, citing partnerships between South African universities and Israeli institutions despite mounting evidence of apartheid and genocide. The erosion of these spaces, she argued, mirrored a broader collapse of progressive resistance that once played a central role in ending apartheid.
Other speakers framed Gaza as a test case for the global order. Yara Hawari, co-director of Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, situated the genocide in Gaza within a broader struggle against entrenched systems of domination, argued that Palestinian liberation cannot be separated from global movements resisting colonialism, racial capitalism and authoritarian power.
In her account, Gaza is not an isolated site of violence but a warning of how repression, surveillance and collective punishment are normalised and exported. That framing, she suggested, makes solidarity and coordinated action across borders not symbolic but necessary, reinforcing the argument that state-level initiatives such as the Hague Group must be anchored in transnational popular mobilisation if they are to have force.
Saleh Hijazi of the Palestinian BDS National Committee framed the moment as a test of whether the “global majority” was willing to translate mobilisation into material obstruction. He argued that popular action had already shifted public discourse, but that the next phase required backing the Hague Group’s commitments to block the routes that sustain Israeli power.
That meant denying territorial waters, ports and borders for the transport of weapons, explosives and energy to Israel, even where no direct arms trade exists.
Hijazi called for coordinated pressure to disrupt key transit corridors, from the Mediterranean to strategic maritime passages in southeast Asia, and to sever both direct and indirect links of complicity, including public contracts, academic partnerships and municipal ties.
When powerful states attempt to normalise impunity, he said, the response must be collective pushback. The Hague Group, Hijazi argued, represents the most strategic state-level formation to emerge at this moment, but its success depends on sustained mobilisation to ensure that commitments move from declaration to enforcement.
Zane Dangor, director-general of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, framed the Hague Group as a response to the systematic erosion of international law through selective enforcement and political exceptionalism.
He said the group was established to confront Israel’s actions in Gaza, which South Africa regards as among the most serious breaches of international law in recent history, but also to address a broader pattern in which powerful states evade accountability. Dangor warned that sustained political attacks on both the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court risk hollowing out institutions created after the second world war to ensure that all states are bound by the same rules. He drew a distinction between the ICC, which states may opt out of, and the ICJ, whose jurisdiction applies to all UN members, noting that efforts to undermine the court followed directly from attempts by states such as South Africa to hold more powerful actors to account.
The Hague Group, he argued, seeks to defend the integrity of the international legal system itself, insisting that accountability must apply universally and that no state should be shielded from scrutiny by power or privilege.
The question of popular mobilisation recurred throughout the meeting. Several speakers lamented the decline of sustained mass protest since the announcement of a so-called ceasefire in Gaza, arguing that the illusion of resolution had dulled urgency even as violence continued.
Pandor drew a direct parallel with South Africa’s liberation struggle, noting that apartheid ended not through episodic outrage but decades of relentless pressure.
The Hague Group’s emergence reflects a recognition that the old order is failing. Whether it becomes a vehicle for genuine enforcement or another forum for moral posturing will depend on whether its members are willing to align their economic practices with their legal claims. As the coal figures now circulating make clear, that reckoning has already arrived.