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In a recent speech at Chatham House, the UK Attorney General, Richard Hermer, launched a principled defence of international law and attacked what he called the ‘pick-and-mix’ approach of those who seek to discard our principles whenever it is inconvenient.
His explicit targets were Conservative and Reform UK politicians who have attacked the UK’s agreement to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. Indeed, he subsequently apologised to them for comparing their attitudes to those of the political theorist Carl Schmitt, who notoriously supported the Nazis – although on the merits, what he said was appropriate.
Hermer’s credentials
Hermer is persistently targeted by the far right, particularly over the imprisonment of Lucy Connolly, the Conservative councillor’s wife who tweeted in favour of burning down asylum hotels. Although the decision to prosecute was made by the Crown Prosecution Service and Connolly pleaded guilty, with her sentence decided by a judge, Conservative and Reform politicians have blamed Hermer. The opportunist Conservative leadership wannabe, Robert Jenrick, has also targeted him because of the individuals Hermer defended as a barrister.
Even the Trump-sympathetic wing of the Labour Party have Hermer in their sights too. In an extraordinary attack earlier this year, the ‘Blue Labour’ founder, Maurice Glasman, reported to be close to Keir Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, told the New Statesman that Hermer was ‘an arrogant progressive fool who thinks that law is a replacement for politics’. Hermer certainly came to office with progressive credentials. A Jewish lawyer who was critical of Israel before he joined the government 11 months ago, he told LBC on 28 October 2023 that ‘it is almost impossible to conceive of how a siege that deprives a civilian population of the basic necessities of life… is in compliance with international law’.
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UK support for Israel
19 months on, Hermer’s rejection, at Chatham House, of the idea that Britain “should abandon the constraints of international law in favour of raw power” obviously brings to mind the Labour Government’s complicity in the vastly greater crimes that Israel and the USA, two of its key allies, have since committed, and are still committing, in Gaza. Starmer and his Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, both of them also lawyers, have been unusually critical of Israel in recent weeks. The Prime Minister even joined the French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian leader Mark Carney in denouncing Israel’s denial of humanitarian aid to the population of Gaza, promising “further concrete actions” if Israel continued. Yet this mystified observers, since few actions against Israel have been observed.
Despite occasional criticisms, most of the UK Government’s “concrete” actions have effectively supported Israel’s campaign. The UK signed a military cooperation agreement with Israel in 2020, when Boris Johnson was Prime Minister. Under this deal, the RAF has conducted very regular surveillance flights over Gaza since October 2023, apparently sharing information with Israel on the pretext of assisting them to rescue hostages held by Hamas. This claim has long been threadbare: it is obvious that Israel’s main purpose is to assault Gaza’s civilian population, despite the loss of hostage lives which this has caused, while spurning agreements to secure their release. Indeed, Israel has now clearly stated its intention to permanently occupy most, if not all, of Gaza in open defiance of international law.
Labour’s one concrete step against Israel has been to restrict some arms supplies, but the impact of this is fundamentally weakened by its insistence on supplying parts for the F35 bombers, the main platform that Israel uses to destroy Gaza. In court, in the same week that Hermer made his appeal, the government doubled down on its specious justification that the abstract ‘benefits’ of the international F35 programme for ‘international peace and security’ outweigh the manifest harms of Israel’s use of F35s against Palestinian civilians, in breach of international humanitarian law.
Hermer himself has been implicated in limiting sanctions to those weapons that officials ‘could be sure’ would be used against civilians. At a time when the harm Israel is deliberately inflicting on the population of Gaza is so comprehensive and extreme, this is a ridiculously narrow criterion. The International Criminal Court, in issuing arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister on a comprehensive list of war crimes and crimes against humanity, said that these were ‘part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Gaza’. This obviously raises the question of genocide, on which Hermer has been silent and Starmer and Lammy have both engaged in disingenuous denial. Is it really legal to engage in business as usual with a genocidal state? Article 3 of the Genocide Convention, which lists ‘complicity’ as a crime, suggests otherwise.
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Where does the UK stand?
The evidence shows that the UK’s adherence to international law is at best token. The Government’s one new concrete step against Israel was to suspend talks on a proposed trade agreement, which hardly constituted a sanction. Moreover, the next day, the UK trade envoy Ian Austin – a former Labour MP who was appointed to the role (and a peerage) by Boris Johnson after he left the party and urged voters to support the Conservatives – was drumming up business from companies in Israel.
Meanwhile, the RAF’s surveillance flights continued; the minister for defence procurement, Maria Eagle, had proudly boasted about them at an Israeli embassy party on May 16, hosted by the aggressive ambassador, Tzipi Hotoveley, and also attended by the Conservative and Reform leaders. Then, junior foreign office minister, Jenny Chapman, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that the UK’s disagreement about Israel was only about one issue and ‘could easily be overcome’. So, if Israel allowed in a bare minimum of humanitarian aid, it could continue its bombardment, displacement and forced concentration of the population with impunity, so far as the UK was concerned?
These are the pronouncements of figures close to Starmer and Lammy, who themselves have cultivated close relationships with Israel, for example hosting its foreign minister and the head of the Israel Defence Force. On Holocaust Memorial Day earlier this year, Lammy appeared with the ambassador, while Starmer made a ‘never again’ speech which failed to mention Gaza.
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The threat to international law
These are not purely British concerns. As Richard Hermer rightly says, raw power is triumphing over law. South Africa’s case against Israel in the ICJ has been kicked further into the long grass by a decision to give Israel an extra six months to prepare its response. Neither South Africa nor any other state has yet sought further measures against Israel to restrict its ever more egregious crimes. The UK, as usual, is nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, US sanctions against the International Criminal Court are impacting its ability to pursue its charges against Israel’s leaders as well as other major cases.
Israel’s 19-month destruction of Gaza’s civilian population becomes ever more extreme. Its disregard of international humanitarian law has long been utterly blatant and the consensus that it is committing genocide – a marginal opinion when I first argued it on these pages in October 2023 – grows ever-larger, including now the prime ministers of Ireland and Spain, as well as Amnesty International, which published a comprehensive analysis evidence and legal arguments over six months ago, and authoritative British publications like The Economist and the Financial Times.
Against this backdrop, Richard Hermer’s appeal raises this question. When will he, and the government of which he is a part, provide substance for their support for international law? Or is this all smoke and mirrors, obscuring the United Kingdom’s comprehensive capitulation to Donald Trump?