THE HAGUE: The UN's top court on Thursday rejected a case brought by Qatar accusing the United Arab Emirates of discrimination during a blockade of Doha, which has since been lifted.
Qatar filed the case in 2018, a year after Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt cut land, air and sea links over claims the gas-rich nation backed Islamists and was too close to Iran.
Qatar's rivals agreed to lift the restrictions at a summit in January and the UAE reopened its borders to Qatar days later, while adding it would take longer to fully rebuild trust.
Doha had said the UAE's actions during the three-year blockade had breached the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD), a UN treaty.
But the International Court of Justice said that it "upholds the first preliminary objection raised by the UAE" that racial discrimination did not include nationality under the terms of the convention.
"The court finds that it has no jurisdiction to entertain the application filed by the state of Qatar," ICJ President Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf said in The Hague.
He said the UAE's measures "are not capable of constituting racial discrimination within the meaning of the convention."
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