The Democratic Republic of Congo filed an application instituting proceedings against Rwanda before the International Court of Justice on 26 June 2024, formally bringing decades of conflict in eastern Congo into the UN's principal judicial organ. Reuters reports that Kinshasa accuses Kigali of breaching a suite of international conventions — on the prevention and punishment of genocide, racial discrimination, discrimination against women, and torture. AP confirms the case is framed around Rwanda's role in prolonged violence in eastern Congo.

The case, formally titled Armed Activities on the Territory of the Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo v. Rwanda), is listed as a pending contentious case at the ICJ. It is procedurally distinct from an earlier 2002 iteration between the same parties — which the Court ultimately dismissed in 2006 for lack of jurisdiction — but it draws on overlapping factual terrain: cross-border military support, the presence of armed groups, and the contested sovereignty of eastern provinces. The filing of a new application signals Kinshasa's calculation that the treaty bases invoked this time — particularly the Genocide Convention and the Convention Against Torture — may clear the jurisdictional hurdles that sank the earlier case.

That strategic framing matters. The ICJ's jurisdiction in inter-state disputes is not automatic; it depends on both parties having accepted the Court's authority, typically through treaty clauses. By anchoring claims in multilateral conventions to which Rwanda is a party, Congo is threading jurisdictional needle more carefully than in previous attempts. Whether the Court agrees is the first major question the proceedings will answer — likely at a preliminary objections phase before any merits hearing.

The procedural timeline is already moving. Oral arguments in a related phase of the case were scheduled for 24 to 26 November 2025 at the Peace Palace in The Hague. Separately, Congo submitted written observations on the admissibility of its declaration of intervention on 17 March 2025 in the Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide case — suggesting Kinshasa is pursuing a multi-track legal strategy at the ICJ simultaneously.

The backdrop is a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions since the 1990s. Rwanda's support for the M23 rebel group — denied by Kigali but documented by UN Group of Experts reports — is the operational core of Congo's grievances. Framing that support as a treaty violation, rather than simply an armed attack, opens legal avenues that general international law would not. The Genocide Convention, for instance, obligates states not just to refrain from genocide but to prevent it; Congo's theory presumably argues that Rwandan conduct in eastern Congo triggers those positive obligations in reverse.

The Belgian envoy's April 2024 public call for Congo to pursue exactly this route — urging Kinshasa to file an ICJ complaint over Rwanda's failure to respect its border — illustrated how the legal option was being actively discussed in diplomatic circles before the application landed. Congo followed through roughly two months later.

For practitioners watching the docket, the case joins a growing cluster of treaty-based inter-state disputes at the ICJ — alongside Ukraine v. Russia, South Africa v. Israel, and others — where states are reaching for convention mechanisms as instruments of political pressure as much as legal remedy. ICJ proceedings move slowly; a final judgment, if the case survives jurisdictional challenges, is realistically years away. But provisional measures, which can be requested and decided in months, carry their own weight: a Court order directing Rwanda to halt certain conduct would carry reputational and diplomatic costs even without immediate enforcement.

Rwanda's response to the application — and its arguments at the preliminary objections phase — will determine whether this case becomes a vehicle for genuine accountability or stalls at the threshold, as the 2002 proceedings did. What has changed since then is the treaty architecture Congo is now invoking and a more developed body of ICJ jurisprudence on the reach of the Genocide Convention following the Bosnia v. Serbia and Gambia v. Myanmar proceedings. Kinshasa's legal architects will be drawing on both.