The Nottebohm Smoking Gun: When Both Amnesty and HRW Made the Identical Legal "Error" ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Friday, February 06, 2026

The Nottebohm Smoking Gun: When Both Amnesty and HRW Made the Identical Legal "Error"

My article yesterday about Human Rights Watch's shelved report calling Israel's immigration policy a "crime against humanity" reminded me of the last time HRW and Amnesty International claimed that international law requires Israel to accept millions of Palestinian "refugees" and their descendants.

Back in 2013, I noticed something curious: both organizations pointed to the same International Court of Justice case—Nottebohm (1955)—as proof that Palestinians have a legal "right of return" based on maintaining emotional and familial ties to territory their ancestors left. (Amnesty wrote about it in 2001, HRW in 2002.)

Their logic went like this: The Nottebohm case established that nationality requires a "genuine connection of existence, interests and sentiments" between a person and a place. Palestinians who maintain ties to the land—even generations later—therefore have legal rights to return based on this genuine connection. Israel's refusal to honor this violates international law.

There was only one problem: Not only did the Nottebohm case not say what they claimed, it said the opposite.

The Nottebohm case involved a German businessman, Friedrich Nottebohm, who had lived in Guatemala for 34 years. When World War II broke out, he hastily obtained citizenship from Liechtenstein (where he had minimal ties) to avoid being treated as an enemy alien. Guatemala refused to recognize this new citizenship and seized his property. Liechtenstein sued on his behalf, claiming he was now their citizen and deserved diplomatic protection.

The ICJ ruled against Liechtenstein, finding that Nottebohm's "naturalization was not based on any real prior connection with Liechtenstein." The Court stated that nationality should reflect "a genuine connection of existence, interests and sentiments" between an individual and a STATE—not a territory.

Notice the critical distinction: The case was about which state could claim someone as a national for purposes of diplomatic protection. It was about citizenship and state sovereignty, not about territorial rights.

The key passage states: "nationality is a legal bond having as its basis a social fact of attachment, a genuine connection of existence, interests and sentiments, together with the existence of reciprocal rights and duties."

HRW and Amnesty quoted the "genuine connection" language while systematically replacing "state" with "territory" to twist a ruling about citizenship into one about land rights.

Here's what makes this particularly absurd: Nottebohm himself had genuine ties to Guatemala—34 years of residence, extensive business operations, deep roots in the community. Yet the ICJ ruled that Guatemala had no obligation to grant him citizenship or even recognize his Liechtenstein citizenship.

If anything, Nottebohm affirmed that states have absolute sovereign control over who they grant citizenship to, even when someone has genuine territorial connections. The ruling explicitly states: "it is for each State to determine under its own law who are its nationals."

This is the exact opposite of a "right of return" based on ancestral territorial ties.

When I wrote about this in 2013, I kept second-guessing myself. How could I—a non-lawyer, a blogger—have read the case so differently from two major international human rights organizations with teams of highly credentialed lawyers?

I must be missing something, I thought. Maybe there's some nuance in international law I don't understand. Maybe my layman's reading of the text was naive. These organizations have reputations to uphold. Surely they wouldn't deliberately misrepresent an ICJ decision.

So I published my analysis tentatively, always wondering if I'd gotten something wrong.

After writing about Omar Shakir and HRW's institutional bias yesterday, I decided to revisit Nottebohm with fresh eyes—and with new tools. I asked Claude (an AI system with legal analysis capabilities) to review both my 2013 article and the full text of the Nottebohm decision to identify any errors in my interpretation.

The verdict: I was right. HRW and Amnesty were wrong.

The case is explicitly about the relationship between individuals and states for citizenship purposes. It uses the word "state" throughout, not "territory." It affirms state sovereignty over nationality determinations. It provides zero support for territorial rights based on ancestral connections.

My layman's reading of the plain text was more accurate than the "expert analysis" from two major human rights organizations.

This raises a much more serious question: How could two supposedly independent human rights organizations, both staffed with professional lawyers, both look at the same ICJ case and both arrive at the same incorrect conclusion—while I, as a layman, got it right?

The odds of this being coincidental are essentially zero. When two students turn in identical wrong answers on a test, we know what happened.

This is evidence of either:

Coordination: They're working from shared advocacy networks or talking points
Shared ideology: They're part of the same ecosystem where the conclusion (Israel violates international law) is predetermined
Institutional capture: Both organizations have been captured by an anti-Israel ideology that treats legal research as window dressing for predetermined conclusions

Nottebohm is not an obscure footnote. It's one of the most cited ICJ cases on nationality. The language is clear. The distinction between "state" and "territory" is fundamental to international law.

Their lawyers are not incompetent. They knew they were misrepresenting the case. The alternative—that multiple teams of international lawyers at two different organizations all somehow failed to notice they were confusing states with territories—is simply not credible.

This means both organizations made a deliberate choice to cite a case for the opposite of what it says because it served their advocacy goals.

This isn't an isolated incident. It's the pattern:

Amnesty invents its own definition of "genocide" to accuse Israel
HRW claims standard immigration policy is a "crime against humanity"
Both misrepresent Nottebohm to create a fictional "right of return"
Both apply novel legal theories only to Israel
Both start with the conclusion that Israel is guilty and work backwards

What I've learned over two decades of documenting this is that both Amnesty and HRW approach every Israel-related issue from the position that Israel must be violating international law. They will twist evidence, cherry-pick sources, invent new legal standards, and—as Nottebohm proves—cite cases for the opposite of what they say.

Whether this is conscious malice or unconscious bias, I cannot say. But what I can say with certainty is that it's systematic, consistent, and deliberate.

When I wrote about Nottebohm in 2013, I thought maybe I'd misunderstood something. Now I know: They're the ones who chose to lie rather than tell a truth that might support Israel's position.

And that tells you everything you need to know about whether these organizations can be trusted on anything related to Israel.