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Not The Hague. And not Addis Ababa either. Port-au-Prince.
The Hague has had centuries at the centre of the European system that wrote the rules, built empires, extracted wealth, and later appointed itself custodian of "international justice."
Addis Ababa would certainly move that centre south. Ethiopia carries enormous anti-colonial significance, and Addis already hosts the African Union. But that's precisely why I wouldn't put it there.
Addis Ababa already gets selected whenever institutions want an African capital for diplomacy, continental governance and international legitimacy. It has become the almost automatic institutional answer.
Give someone else the microphone.
🇭🇹 Port-au-Prince.
Haiti didn't merely experience European colonialism. The Haitian Revolution destroyed the slave regime of Saint-Domingue and defeated Napoleon's attempt to restore French control and slavery. Haiti declared independence in 1804.
Then came the punishment for winning.
In 1825, France arrived with warships and demanded an enormous indemnity in exchange for recognizing Haitian independence. Haiti was forced to compensate former French slaveholders for the loss of the people they had claimed as property and the plantations those people had liberated.
Think about the inversion:
The formerly enslaved were made to compensate the former enslavers.
Haiti then spent generations servicing that extraction and the debts constructed around it.
So if we're imagining where an institution claiming universal international justice should sit, don't automatically send it from one established diplomatic capital to another.
Put it in Port-au-Prince.
Put the courthouse where enslaved people overthrew the colonial order and then discovered that empire could continue through debt, finance, recognition, intervention and international institutions after the chains themselves were broken.
⚖️ THE HAGUE → 🇭🇹 PORT-AU-PRINCE
If international justice is actually universal, decolonize its geography too.