Welcome to the Empire Files. There's a very important new international legal effort to hold Israel accountable for its genocide in Gaza.

I'm joined by Varsha Gandhi-Kota, chair of the Hague Group, and Crispin Piri, spokesperson for the Foreign Minister of South Africa.

Thank you so much, both of you for joining me on the Empire Files.

Varsha, talk about what the Hay Group is and why it was formed.

Yeah, the hay group, really the conversations around it began at the one-year mark

of the genocide against the Palestinian people with this recognition that surely, surely

this could not possibly still be going on.

As one of the lawyers in the South African case of the ICJ said,

this is the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their destruction

to our phones and televisions in real-time live.

And still, a year in, we saw the same continuing

and, in fact, having accelerated to unimaginable levels.

And in response, every time there's been a plea, a demand,

we've seen no response, right?

There's no point asking the United States to do something

that we know it will not to. There's no point issuing the United States to do something that we know it will not do. There's

no point issuing letters and demands to the Israeli government to do things that we know it will not do.

So surely as the world, we had to find other ways to respond that also went beyond our existing

international institutions because we tried using them. We tried using the International Court of Justice getting a ruling that does rule that the last many decades of Israel's

occupation of Palestine is blatantly legal and sets out specific legal obligations of every state

in order to ensure the end of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. And still, we've seen no response. We've seen a brazen

defiance from multiple European nations. We see the ruling from the International Criminal Court

...