Bulgaria won the 70th Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna with Dara’s “Bangaranga”; Israel finished second; and five countries, Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Iceland, stayed away in protest at Israel’s participation. That combination, spectacle, boycott and contested belonging, is a useful entry point into a wider legal problem. Eurovision is not the United Nations. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) is not a sanctions committee. But cultural institutions do not operate outside law simply because they operate through music, sport, voting and prestige. They help decide who is treated as normal, who is placed outside the frame, and when legal condemnation becomes socially meaningful.
The question is therefore not whether Eurovision should become a court or a sanctions committee. It is whether the language of neutrality remains credible when a cultural platform is used, or appears capable of being used, as a stage for State legitimacy, public diplomacy and the normalisation of situations already under serious international legal scrutiny.
Here, the comparison with Russia is unavoidable, although it should not be made crudely. In February 2022, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the EBU excluded Russia from that year’s contest, explaining that the inclusion of a Russian entry, “in light of the unprecedented crisis in Ukraine”, would bring the competition into disrepute. Russia’s invasion was a violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. It also ruptured the 1994 Budapest Memorandum’s post-Cold War security assurances, under which Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States had reaffirmed commitments to respect Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and existing borders, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against Ukraine’s territorial integrity or political independence. The EBU did not purport to adjudicate State responsibility. It made an institutional decision, by reference to its rules, values and reputational integrity.
That matters because the EBU has thereby accepted that participation can become legally and politically charged enough to damage the contest itself. Once that is accepted, neutrality cannot mean simply asking whether the relevant broadcaster is technically eligible. In 2025, after concerns about public voting and coordinated promotion, the EBU adopted new Eurovision voting safeguards for 2026, including clearer rules against disproportionate promotion campaigns, especially those supported by third parties including governments or governmental agencies, and a reduction of the maximum number of votes per payment method from 20 to 10. That was administratively sensible. But it also confirmed the deeper point that Eurovision is not merely a song contest when States, public broadcasters, ministries, diasporas and organised campaigns treat it as a field of public diplomacy and narrative influence operations. Arguably, the relevant campaign logic is not simply persuasion, still less disinformation, but reputational normalisation, i.e. the use of cultural visibility, public affection and institutional belonging to make a contested legal and political situation appear ordinary. Its force lies precisely in its soft power. It does not need to deny legal controversy; it can instead surround that controversy with music, spectacle and shared emotion, making continued participation feel like normal cultural life rather than a choice with legal and political significance.
This is where the law of non-recognition becomes relevant, but only if handled carefully. Article 41(2) of the International Law Commission’s Articles on State Responsibility provides that no State shall recognise as lawful a situation created by a serious breach of a peremptory norm, nor render aid or assistance in maintaining that situation. Contributors to EJIL:Talk! have already explored this duty in relation to Russia, Western sanctions and territorial annexation. However, the contemporary pressure point is its translation into institutional and cultural settings within the global information environment.
In the ICJ’s Namibia Advisory Opinion, the Court held that States were under an obligation not to recognise South Africa’s continued presence in Namibia as lawful, while also preserving a humanitarian/legal-vacuum exception for acts, such as registration of births, deaths and marriages, whose non-recognition would harm the population. The Wall Advisory Opinion then required States not to recognise the illegal situation resulting from construction of the wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining it. In its 2024 Advisory Opinion on Israel’s policies and practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, the Court went further in relation to Israel’s continued presence, finding it unlawful and identifying obligations of non-recognition and non-assistance for States, and obligations for the United Nations and other international organisations.
Accordingly, the duty of non-recognition does not automatically bind the EBU as though it were a State or an international organisation. Non-recognition is not merely a matter of bilateral diplomacy; it also operates in international and regional institutional settings. But two limits are important. First, the argument here is not that the EBU itself bears the same legal obligations as a State. Those obligations shape the legal and political environment in which States, public authorities, public broadcasters and cultural institutions justify participation, exclusion and neutrality. Secondly, cultural participation is not the same as formal recognition of sovereignty, borders or title to territory. Participation in Eurovision does not, by itself, validate settlements, annexation, occupation or unlawful military operations. Nor has South Africa v Israel produced final findings of genocide. The Court’s provisional measures under the Genocide Convention therefore require care precisely because they are provisional. But to stop there would be too easy. Non-recognition is not concerned only with embassies, flags and formal diplomatic acts. More broadly, it is concerned with whether States and institutions help stabilise and normalise the appearance that an unlawful situation is ordinary, accepted or cost-free.
The apartheid analogy is instructive not because every case is identical, but because it shows how law, sport, culture, and soft power can interact. The Apartheid Convention characterised apartheid as a crime against humanity. The International Convention against Apartheid in Sports required States parties to take measures against sporting contacts with apartheid South Africa. Sporting and cultural exclusion did not by itself end apartheid. But it formed part of a wider international community of pressure that denied the regime the comfort of normality. It helped convert a domestic policy defended by a State into a global legitimacy crisis.
That history should not be invoked lazily. Boycotts can be selective, performative and unfair to artists. They may harden rather than open political positions. They may also reproduce the very simplifications that international law ought to resist. The Namibia exception is therefore important. Non-recognition cannot mean the indiscriminate erasure of people, private life, artists, audiences or civil society. Nor can every cultural event become a miniature Security Council. The better question is institutional and evidential, namely when does participation become connected enough to State policy, propaganda, territorial illegality or the maintenance of an unlawful situation that neutrality itself becomes a form of normalisation?
Eurovision’s recent difficulty lies precisely in that grey zone of institutional entanglement. Israel participates through KAN, the Israeli public broadcaster, not through the Israeli government directly. That distinction matters, and it should not be collapsed. KAN’s editorial independence is itself part of the public-service broadcasting model that the EBU has defended. But the distinction is not conclusive where Eurovision participation becomes entangled with state public diplomacy. In 2025, the controversy was not merely that Israel’s entry attracted strong public support. It was that official state channels, including the Israeli Government Advertising Agency, state social media accounts and Israeli embassies, were reported to have encouraged voters abroad to support Israel’s entry. The EBU’s later rule changes, aimed at disproportionate promotional campaigns supported by governments or governmental agencies, implicitly recognised that this was not an ordinary fan-mobilisation problem. It was a problem about the instrumentalisation of cultural participation by State-linked actors. The point is not that Russia and Israel must be treated as identical legal cases. They are not. Nor is the point that KAN’s conduct is automatically attributable to Israel for all purposes of international responsibility. The claim is narrower, namely once cultural participation is accompanied by public-broadcaster status, governmental amplification, diplomatic mobilisation and reputational campaigning, it becomes difficult for an institution to invoke disrepute, values and neutrality in one case while treating cultural normalisation as legally weightless in another.
A workable standard would not require automatic exclusion, rather it would require reason-giving. The EBU, and comparable sporting and cultural institutions, should ask at least four questions. First, is the relevant State, public broadcaster or official apparatus using participation to legitimise conduct or a situation under serious international legal condemnation? Secondly, would participation risk implying ordinary acceptance of an unlawful situation, contrary to the logic of non-recognition, even if no formal recognition is involved? Thirdly, are there less restrictive measures, such as voting safeguards, limits on official promotion, neutral participants, presentation rules or public reasons, capable of reducing that risk? Fourthly, is the institution applying its standards consistently across friends, adversaries and politically protected States?
This is where boycotts may have legal significance, even when they are not legal sanctions. Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Iceland did not determine the international legal status of any situation by staying away. Their absence instead raised a narrower institutional question, namely whether participation, visibility and celebration can be treated as neutral where the relevant State or public broadcaster is operating against the background of serious international legal scrutiny. Boycotts of this kind do not settle legal disputes, and they should not be romanticised. But they can signal that cultural normality is itself part of the terrain on which legal and political legitimacy is contested.
This brings us back to “Bangaranga”. The word may mean nonsense, energy, hope, or all three. Its suggestion that “everything is possible” captures something of Eurovision’s appeal, namely its ability to create a temporary space of spectacle, levity and shared attention. That should not be dismissed. Cultural events can offer respite, connection and joy. The difficulty arises where that same cultural space is asked to carry claims of neutrality while also conferring visibility, prestige or reputational benefit in circumstances of serious legal controversy. The task, then, is not to abandon cultural exchange, but to ask more carefully when participation becomes normalisation, and when neutrality requires reasons rather than silence.