UNITED NATIONS, NEW YORK — The UN General Assembly and the Security Council, voting simultaneously but separately on Tuesday, November 3, elected five judges to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations' principal court for disputes between states. The five elected are Phoebe Okowa of Kenya, Dapo Akande of the United Kingdom, François Alabrune of France, Mahmoud Daifallah Hmoud of Jordan and Rena Lee of Singapore, the UN's own media service confirmed. Their nine-year terms begin on February 6, 2027, and run to 2036.
Source: UN Media (media.un.org), Nov 3, 2026
Nine candidates stood for the five seats. To be elected, a candidate needs an absolute majority in both bodies at once — at least 97 votes in the 193-member General Assembly and at least 8 in the 15-member Security Council — and there is no veto in these elections: the five permanent members' votes count the same as any other Council member's. If more than five candidates clear the majority in either body, voting continues until exactly five have the required support in both, which is what made Tuesday's election run to multiple rounds.
Source: UN Media election explainer, Nov 3, 2026
Okowa's seat took three rounds — and three withdrawals
Four of the five — Akande, Alabrune, Hmoud and Lee — were elected in the first round. The fifth seat took longer. Kenya's Phoebe Okowa, who has sat on the Court since November 2025 filling the remainder of a term vacated by Judge Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf of Somalia, was short of the required majority in the Security Council in the early rounds despite strong General Assembly support. The candidates of Sierra Leone (Charles Chernor Jalloh), Ecuador (Marcelo Vázquez-Bermúdez) and South Korea (Jin-Hyun Paik) then withdrew, and in the decisive third round Okowa defeated Peru's Luz del Carmen Ibáñez Carranza, taking 13 votes in the Security Council to her rival's none and a commanding majority — reported at up to 183 votes — in the General Assembly. She now moves from a remainder term, which would have expired on February 5, 2027, to a full nine-year mandate of her own.
Source: Kenya Feed, Nov 3, 2026; Radio Generation (Kenya), Nov 3, 2026
Who the new judges are
Dapo Akande, elected for the United Kingdom, is the Chichele Professor of Public International Law at the University of Oxford and a member of the UN International Law Commission — and his election returns a British judge to the Court for the first time since 2018, after the UK lost its seat in the 2017 election. François Alabrune of France is a legal expert and diplomat. Mahmoud Daifallah Hmoud of Jordan, like Okowa, first joined the Court in 2025 through a by-election to fill a vacancy, and now holds a full term. Rena Lee of Singapore completes the five. The Court has 15 judges in total, elected for staggered nine-year terms, with five seats contested every three years; it sits at the Peace Palace in The Hague and decides legal disputes between states and advisory questions from UN bodies.
Source: Radio Generation (Kenya), Nov 3, 2026; UN Media, Nov 3, 2026
Tuesday's meetings were chaired by the office-holders of the moment: Latvia's permanent representative Sanita Pavļuta-Deslandes presided over the Security Council, which Latvia leads for the month of November — the first time in its history that the Baltic state has held the Council presidency — and Khalilur Rahman, President of the General Assembly's eighty-first session, chaired the Assembly's 35th plenary meeting. Nigeria's permanent representative Jimoh Ibrahim publicly congratulated Akande — who was born in Nigeria before his British academic career — and described Nigeria's recent run of UN elections as leaving only Security Council membership to complete what he called a “100 per cent UN achievement” for his country; Nigeria's own candidate, Taoheed Olufemi Elias, had withdrawn from the race before the vote.
Source: UN Media, Nov 3, 2026; Inner City Press UN Gate report, Nov 3, 2026
Why a court election in New York matters
The ICJ is where the world's hardest legal arguments end up: boundaries, treaty breaches, reparations and the law of war and occupation are argued before these 15 judges, and their rulings — while enforceable only through politics and the Security Council — set the legal frame governments and courts everywhere else cite. The composition chosen on Tuesday will hear the cases of the next decade. For South Asian readers the Court is not abstract: it was an Indian judge's election in 2017 that ended the UK's long hold on a seat, and the bench elected this week will sit in judgment on disputes that reach from maritime borders to the legal consequences of the wars now running in the Middle East and Ukraine.
Source: Awaaz Punjab analysis, Nov 3, 2026
What is solid
- Five judges elected Nov 3: Phoebe Okowa (Kenya), Dapo Akande (UK), François Alabrune (France), Mahmoud Daifallah Hmoud (Jordan), Rena Lee (Singapore) — UN Media
- Terms begin February 6, 2027 and run nine years; election required absolute majorities in both the General Assembly (97) and Security Council (8), with no veto — UN Media
- Okowa has served since November 2025 filling the remainder of Judge Yusuf's term; Hmoud also first joined in a 2025 by-election — Kenya Feed / Radio Generation
What is only claimed
- The exact General Assembly tally for Okowa's final round (reported up to 183) comes from Kenyan reporting of the count, not a UN-published figure
- Nigeria's claim of a near-complete “UN conquest” is its own ambassador's framing around a British candidate of Nigerian birth — Akande was elected as the United Kingdom's judge, not Nigeria's
What happens next
The five take their seats on February 6, 2027, when the terms they were elected to replace expire. Between now and then the Court continues with its current bench; the next triennial election, for the following five seats, falls in 2029. The first tests of the new bench will be the cases already on the docket — and, as always with this court, the ones no government has yet dared to file.