Georgia yesterday resurrected an international racial discrimination convention from the 1960s to take Russia to a United Nations court in The Hague over its invasion of South Ossetia, accusing Moscow of ethnic cleansing.

If successful, the novel legal move could yield a symbolic victory for Tbilisi, which says it was the victim of Russian aggression in last month's conflict. But Russia made clear it would defend itself in the court, which has yet to decide whether it has jurisdiction.

Georgia's legal team was seeking to argue that Russia violated the 1965 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination during three interventions in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, a separatist region, from 1990 to August 2008.