Fifty years ago, Morocco threatened to start a war with Spain in order to seize Madrid’s colony in Western Sahara. Hassan II, Morocco’s embattled monarch, rolled out this exercise in brinkmanship on October 16, 1975, just hours after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a landmark opinion calling for the territory’s independence.

While Morocco’s stated aim was to “recover” Western Sahara, the ICJ indicated that the territory had never belonged to Morocco in the first place, even according to the tortured, self-serving definitions of sovereignty that Moroccan jurists presented in the summer of 1975. Indeed, the court made a notable determination about the actual sovereign power in Western Sahara before the Berlin Conference of 1885 that carved up Africa between the states of Europe.

According to the ICJ, Western Sahara had not been terra nullius — a no-man’s land and thus a zone of free occupation — when Spanish colonization began in 1884. The people of Western Sahara, now commonly referred to as the Sahrawis, had already been sovereign. Brushing aside all historical claims to the territory, the judges in The Hague unequivocally called for Western Sahara’s self-determination.