Category Archives: Misc

Misc

Are We Losing Our Civil Liberties? New podcast with Prospect Magazine

Is Britain becoming a police state?

This week, Ellen and Imaan are joined by Conor Gearty, a barrister and professor of human rights law at LSE, who explains how his views on the future of protest have changed.  The podcast can be found here.

As hundreds have been arrested for supporting the recently proscribed group Palestine Action, Conor discusses his reaction to the ban. He criticises the Labour government’s stance on protest, which he says panders to a “middle covert authoritarianism”.

Conor also weighs in on what’s at stake if Britain leaves the ECHR, and how to fortify democracy. Are protests from the political left and right treated differently? And how should Labour respond to Reform’s rhetoric on human rights?

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/podcasts/prospect-podcast/70975/are-we-losing-our-civil-liberties

Misc

Postcard from Bayreuth


I was about 400 metres away when it dawned on me, what it reminded me of. I had taken a week by myself to visit the Wagner music festival in the small Bavarian town of Bayreuth. It was this Summer, the weather was glorious and I had tickets to the Ring Cycle, Wagner’s masterpiece of musical theatre, four long operas to be seen over six days, about fifteen hours of music in all. Wagner had built his own theatre on the outskirts of the town in the mid-19th century and it is still there, has been playing his – and only his – music for very nearly 150 years. His Festspiele is on a hill, protected from urban reality by rising lawns; private vehicles are prohibited. As the time for the first of the four operas approached, the ticket-holders with me among them walked up the slope in small groups. We wore our Sunday best, some flamboyantly so, others more modestly, the older assisted by the younger. There was not much talk: all eyes were on the Festspiele rising up ahead, and the looming 6pm start. This was like heading to mass in rural Ireland in the 1960s minus the cars and kids. Wagner is our faith and the Ring his great secular statement.

The idea stayed with me though the most remarkable musical experience of my life that was to follow over the next few days. The operas were presented in the original German with no surtitles; like the old Latin Mass you were expected to know what was going on (and everybody did). There is no air-conditioning and neither water nor snacks are permitted even in the foyer much less the theatre itself. (There are wonderful stalls and restaurants scattered around the hill.) Remarkably, Wagner designed his theatre with the orchestra tucked under the stage, invisible to the audience, like a priest with his back to the congregation. The operas are very long it is true, but then Mass used to be in the old days as well, and like many of Wagner’s characters preachers in the pulpit often engaged in lengthy homilies which (just as with Wagner) flirted with tedium. One difference with Mass lay in the audience engagement. In our religious world the congregation get to participate through the ritual of shared prayer. Not the Wagnerian faithful: the hours and hours of music must be heard in total silence, a mere cough treated like a blasphemous roar. This probably explains the extraordinary scenes that greet the end of each Act but especially when the whole thing is finally over. I had not been prepared for this: feet thumping wildly on Wagner’s old wooden floor, shouts and roars of appreciation, curtain call after curtain call – a chance finally to participate. And celebrate an unforgettable communal experience.

And what is this fabled Ring about, what story does it tell? The rise and fall of the Gods, a war between worlds for control of a devastating power, a ring shaped from the Rhine’s gold. But the Ring I saw had no ring, no Rhine, no gold, no nothing of any supernatural nature – not even (to my slight disappointment I admit) the dragon that Siegfried slays in the third opera. Like the bible, the Ring has depths that defy a single narrative. There was a long literal phase; for fifty years after the composer’s death his grieving widow refused to change a thing. But his son and grandsons eventually got hold of the place and reinterpretation flourished. It still does, under the control now of Wagner’s great Granddaughter Katharina Wagner. My Ring was about power, family and the need to destroy the old order in order to give future generations a chance – the ring was a little kidnapped boy. The crowd loved it perhaps for and at least in spite of this. The grandest of dressers the most formal of attendees, turned out to be the most raucously progressive.

What of the Nazis? Like the Church the Wagnerian story has its shame, the horrible collusion between members of the dynasty (especially Wagner’s daughter-in-law, the English born Winifred) and Hitler himself in the 1920s and 30s, a great fan of the composer for the celebration of German values that he saw in his work. (And no one who has ever seen the non Ring work Meistersingers can disagree.) The Festspiele has thrown up boards explaining in painfully stark terms not just about Winifred but how anti-Semitic Wagner and his wife Cosima were. The memory of great Jewish musicians denied opportunities on account of their faith are scattered around the gardens. This could be something for those who run our own Festspiele St Peter’s to think about, remembering their own historic ugliness.

Towering above the unsavoury past, transcending even the most mediocre of productions, there is the music. There is nothing like it, the grandest most beautiful sound that human kind has ever contrived to make. If the Ring is too much, try Wagner’s great religious last work Parsifal – the funeral of Pope Francis reminded me of some of its extraordinary scenes. Or the most tragic love story of them all, Tristan and Isolde. If you fancy Bayreuth, then next year’s new once-off production of the Ring is a confection of the productions of the last 150 years, in which AI will appear on stage as a ‘generative visual force’.

26 August 2025

Middle East Conflict, Misc, Terrorism

Syria and Terrorism: what’s in a name?

In the dying days of the second Bush administration, officials noted to their embarrassment that, in US eyes, Nelson Mandela was still a ‘terrorist’. His name – and that of other members of South Africa’s governing party the African National Congress – had been placed on a terror watchlist in 1986, at a time when President Reagan was busy currying favour with the staunchly anti-Communist but apartheid regime of P W Botha. This ‘terrorist’ had already enjoyed a state visit and addressed both Houses of Congress in 1994, but it was only in 2008 that US law-makers acted in a bipartisan manner to end this ‘embarrassing impediment to improving U.S.-South Africa relations’ as the sponsors of the change put it.

Will Abu Mohammed al-Jolani have to wait this long? The organisation to which he belongs, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), is on most of the contemporary equivalents of the terror watchlists of the 1980s, required to be hunted down by the ‘global community’ as a bunch of rabid Islamists, intent upon wreaking civilisational havoc. But we are already been prepared for change: his real name is Ahmed al-Sharaa; his dress is less Jihadist than Goldman Sachs; he was never really keen on Al-Qaeda and Islamic State after all though both gave him his start in militant life. Indeed it may not be long before we discover that he enjoys Dickens, or perhaps even Henry James.

Of course al-Sharaa is a clever player in this rebranding, but it would have no traction without his successful violence in Syria. There was an easy $10million waiting for anyone who informs the US as to his whereabouts – but it is unlikely that the authorities will pay up, unless of course that he is reevaluated as dangerous by western power, in which case the terrorist label will be quickly reattached. No end of rebranding will save him then.

Syria’s ousted leaders could tell him a thing or two about terrorist labelling. Syria has been on the US list of terrorist states since 1979 when Assad’s father Hafez al-Assad was its leader. Before then Hafez was less of a pariah, meeting with Henry Kissinger in 1973 (one of Kissinger’s 28 visits to the country) and even hosting US president Richard Nixon in 1974. Jimmy Carter invited Assad senior to the White House when they met in Geneva in 1977, an offer that Assad declined. His designation as a terrorist mastermind did not greatly affect America’s desire to meet with him as even after 1979 successive administrations deemed him vital to the securing of a deal in the Middle-East that would promote US interests. The brutality of Syria’s regime, its attacks on its own people, its authoritarian viciousness, mattered little until eventually after the Arab Spring provoked even more repression in Syria it suddenly did.

The nonsense of describing states and organisations opposed to western interests as terrorist while ignoring the moral obloquy of those opposing them (the good old ‘counter-terrorists’) has been an ever-present in international diplomacy since the 1970s. As so often in the region, it has been Israel that has led the way, successfully characterising its various Palestinian opponents as terrorist and then using this condemnatory label as cover for a series of vicious, expansionist wars, entailing the commission of multiple war crimes across Palestine and Lebanon and now even likely genocide in Gaza. Israel will never allow any of its Palestinian opponents a chance to escape the ‘terrorist’ imprimatur: the last leader to try, Yitzhak Rabin was dispatched by a Zionist fanatic whose subsequent life sentence has been punctuated by frequent campaigns for his release.

In 1994, Stella Rimington, the then head of Britain’s internal security service MI5, gave the annual Dimbleby lecture on BBC 1, choosing the topic of security and democracy. In the course of this lecture, she noted proudly that ‘Over the past eighteen months or so, more than twenty Irish Republican terrorists have been arrested in Great Britain and charged. … All told, some 700 terrorists, both Republican and Loyalist, have been convicted and are currently serving prison sentences; many others are awaiting trial.’ For Rimington a suspected terrorist is a terrorist, their trial an irritant rather than a key safeguard against the miscarriage of justice. It is not so long a step from there to, first, the assassination of alleged terrorists, and then, second, to the assassination of members of a group you have decided is ‘terrorist’, and from there to blowing up the pagers of members of such a group without caring who gets caught up in the violence. Israel has long ago reached that point, and the US is not far behind. HTS wisely want to escape the label, but whether they do depends more on the geopolitical decisions of the US/Israel than it does on their own conduct.

Misc

Homeland Insecurity. Launch LSE 24 October 2024

My speech on the occasion of the launch of my book Homeland Insecurity. The Rise and Rise of Global Anti-terrorism Law at LSE 

This book, largely completed before the events of 7 October 2023 and all that has followed, strikes me now as a prequel to another volume, one with the title Anti-terrorism and Genocide. That would not be a law book, or only barely a law book, but then the story that I tell here did not start as a legal one, being mainly at the start about ‘might’ not ‘right’.


The first substantive chapter in the book we are launching this evening is called ‘IMPERIUM’ and an early subheading in that chapter is entitled ‘PLUNDER’. The pre-history of anti-terrorism law as I tell it is one of naked seizure, seizure, that is, of land and of wealth, and widespread slaughter too, conducted by sophisticated colonial forces whose military capacity (a quirk of the European industrial revolution) made such voracious empire-building realisable. In vain did local peoples around the world seek to resist this wave of terror, their traditional means of defence futile in the face of an unheard-of capacity to kill and destroy. Whole peoples and cultures disappeared or at best were emasculated under the yoke of these fast-growing European empires. (And if genocide was not the point of Empire then it – or something like it – was a necessary part of its success.) None of this appears by the way in the standard works on terrorism which are preoccupied to the exclusion of all else on sub-state rather than state violence.


Over time two things happened among colonised peoples and my subject was born.


First, elements within the indigenous communities among the victims of colonialism learnt to fight back in survivable ways, an explosion here, an assassination there, a sudden assault followed by fast retreat, efforts aimed at mild destabilisation but mainly communication (‘get out of our country’) rather than the unequivocal success on the field of battle that they could see could now no longer be achieved. Pin-pricks for sure but irritating to power, and a bit scary, and potential focal points as well (or so these actors hoped) for the expression of wider popular discontent. Such discontent was more likely if the colonial power could be lured into Amritsar-style excess, as they often were. Indeed the same year as that infamous massacre by Colonel Dyer and his forces in India, 1919, the colonial authorities had already enacted there the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act.


Here was the second big change – as we entered the 20th century no longer would crude military necessity govern, rather it would be the law, equipped of course with emergency powers to do what was required but now laid out carefully for all to see. (I think it was the legalisation of state coercion that was developed during the First World War that paved the way.) The Rowlatt committee which gave rise to the Indian Act in 1919 found itself pointing to the threat of what it explicitly called terrorism as a key reason for its necessity, and from then on – first in the British Empire and then further afield – ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorists’ became a main reason for colonial coercion, an alibi for the promulgation and then exercise of swingeing anti-terrorism laws. The attraction of this language to power lay in its implicit moral evaluation – terrorists were bad so counter-terrorism must be good. There were these wild, barbaric killers in Ireland, Palestine, India, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus – the list is long – standing between Empire and its grateful subjects. Colonial powers have ever since these early 20th century days had what they have called a ‘terrorist’ problem. They have needed it to explain to themselves and their citizens how they could square their avaricious brutality abroad with their supposed commitment to the rule of law and (increasingly as the 20th century progressed) democracy at home. Home was for the decent; home-away (the colonies) was beset by savages.


Of course as we all know Empire lost eventually. How did the language of terrorism, and of anti-terrorism law specifically, survive?

This is the subject of my second main chapter. The Cold War played a part with newly liberated states needing tools with which to control the radical ambitions of some of their comrades, especially if these were Communist and the strategic choice of the new nation was pro-American. Anti-terrorism laws also remained in place to control local populations especially if there was division over the new countries direction – post 1922 Ireland was a case in point here.
And above all settlor colonialist communities needed these laws to police a local population whose land they had seized and many of whose communities they had destroyed in the immediate aftermath of independence. The Protestant settlors of Northern Ireland fit this bill apart from the quirk of their never having left their homeland, which came with them to Ireland as a new United Kingdom and (as we all know) never fully left. The Boers of South Africa were early in this game and more unequivocally independent from the start, the white supremacists of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) relatively late to it – settlors both with nowhere to return to in the event of defeat.


Israel was clearly one of these, awarded a state by the UN after the Second World War but aggressively growing its control over the territories around it until by the end of the 20th century a strong police and military presence both in and outside its original territory was necessary to preserve its ascendancy in the region. Uniquely, the Jewish inhabitants of Israel did not have even a notional colonial home to return to, except 1948 Israel of course, itself the result of a colonisation (by Zionists) within a colony (or British protectorate as it was then called). After the attacks of 11 September 2001, Israel was early in pointing anxious UN authorities to the bevy of anti-terrorism laws it already had on the books, many dating back to the Mandate period and just after. (Thus began a brief period when Israel enjoyed non-pariah status in an organisation briefly more consumed by the problem of ‘terrorism’ than it was with compliance with human rights standards.)


Palestine is at the core of my book, occupying its central chapters. In the late 1960s, post the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, it seemed obvious that Palestine would take its place as one of the many residual battles being fought by colonised peoples for independence. True many colonial powers had already given up, but a few remained, Portugal for example and (as settlor colonialists) both South Africa and Rhodesia. How were the Palestinian people different from the many liberation struggles that were either current or more likely just recently successfully completed? International law unequivocally backed the right of a people to self-determination and words like ‘guerrillas’ and (even) ‘freedom fighters’ captured the acceptance of the violence this right necessitated, the esteem even in which at this time its subaltern battalions were held.


This did not happen. Instead the old colonial descriptions came back into play. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation and its satellite fighters were neither guerrillas nor freedom fighters, they were ‘terrorists’, indeed – more damningly – ‘international terrorists’. How did this come about? The movement of people was much easier in the late 1960s and early 1970s than it had previously been, and television was emerging as a compelling new way in which to reach the world’s audiences. Frustrated at the failure of both conventional war (1967) and guerrilla war (directly after that), Palestinian fighters took to the international stage. Violence-as-communication wreaked havoc across the airports and major cities of Europe in a way that could not have been possible in the colonial era. No heed was paid to the culpability of those caught up in these random atrocities. The violence was shocking. At the same time, there was similar violence being perpetrated by Europe-based subversive groups, also engaged in unpopular and frightening acts of violence in pursuit of their local agendas: the IRA, ETA, the Red Army Faction and so on.


Handed this open goal, Israel scored, creating in the 1970s in multiple ways I trace in the book (building on the work of Lisa Stampnitzky but more forthright in my conclusions I think than she is) a panic about a global war being waged by multiple terrorist groups (the Palestinians among them) against ‘civilisation’ or ‘the West’ – us, in other words, against them. This gathered pace after the Iranian revolution of 1979 when Hezbollah’s success against US/Israeli power in Lebanon a few years after that revolution led to a new concern, about ‘Islamist’ terrorism. A leading apologist for this new terrorist discourse was Israeli representative at the UN at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu. It follows that when the attacks of 11 September 2001 came, the world was primed for the ‘war on terror’ that was quickly to follow. The second half of my book is all about that period.


Where does the law fit in all of this? Clearly after 11 September there has been a cascade of anti-terrorism law, both driven by the UN and separate from that body. But what of before? What of Israel? That state has long thrived on simple images, of a nation created out of an abandoned desert, of a plucky band of socialists creating Nirvana on the Kibbutz, and of a country committed (unlike all its neighbours) to democracy and the rule of law, part of ‘us’ rather than the surrounding hostile ‘them’. It has been vital to Israeli’s international reputation (and so to its stability) to keep all three in play, at least at some level of plausibility. Israel has long been persuasive as to the independence of its legal system, its judiciary and so on, persuasive at least to those prepared to overlook the law’s engagement with non-Jewish residents and the people in the land it occupies. The place has seemed to its supporters in the Global North and beyond to be subject to law – and that has been enough for those of its many passive supporters who don’t want to look too closely.


This same pattern was followed with its responses to terrorism. Quite early on, Israel framed its counter-terrorism as legitimate self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter. Such defence could, Israel asserted, be against non-governmental entities within states (the PLO; Hezbollah) as well as states who harboured them (Lebanon; in the early days Jordan) and it could also be pre-emptive rather than reactive, even if what it was said to be pre-empting was far distant in the future. Conveniently, neither the validity of this reliance on Article 51, nor the legality of the force used under its cover could be the subject of scrutiny in any judicial fora. Freed from scrutiny, Israel could kill thousands in Lebanon (supposedly under the protection of Article 51) because an attempt had been made on the life of their ambassador in London. This is not an ‘eye for an eye’, it is tens of thousands of eyes for one partial blinding, massacres disguised as counter-terrorism.


And so to today, when literally a people is being wiped out in front of us and with our practical support, all in the name of counter-terrorism. One chapter of Homeland Insecurity is devoted to ‘liberal pushback’, ways in which the traditional concerns of liberalism (for human rights and the rule of law) have pushed back against counter-terrorist excess. At the time I wrote the book I was largely optimistic about this development. In particular and like many others I have viewed the International Criminal Court (ICC) as a good thing, as a way of challenging the viciousness of state responses to terrorism where it can be seen to involve ‘war crimes’ or ‘crimes against humanity’. Of course Israel did not subscribe to this framework of accountability but then a jurisdictional ruling of the ICC – pre 7 October – found that their conduct in Palestine could be caught by it. There followed the decision of the ICC’s chief prosecutor Karim Khan to seek arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, and then – most dramatically of all – the stark rulings about genocide issued by the International Court of Justice.


I am less optimistic now. What has been the effect on Israel, and its primary backers the US, of these rulings? How have Israel’s secondary supporters among the former colonial powers in Europe reacted? For someone who wants to believe in law, the answer is depressingly clear: the effect has been zero, the platitudes about peace are as empty as ever, while the delivery of weaponry, material and logistical support remain as real as they always been, with tens of thousands dead, maimed, orphaned as a result. No one is safe, not the UN, not the Lebanese, not journalists, not university professors, not aid or health workers. The monster that is Israeli-terror destroys them all.


As for Israel, it no longer even bothers seriously to defend its mass killing along even spuriously lawful lines. The days are largely gone when Israel pretended to be investigating its own atrocities or claimed its latest attack on a school or a hospital or the UN was really the work of Hamas. It just kills away. Meanwhile its supporters in the US and Europe mobilise the law against those determined to oppose the realisation in real time of the genocidal plan against which the ICJ has warned. University departments are coerced or naively fooled into debating the evils of anti-Semitism, a term that the supporters of Zionism have successfully distorted to embrace any criticism of Israel, even it would seem a genocidal Israel.

I don’t remember any concern for the sensibilities of the expatriate Hutu communities during the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Their saviour then was not the UN or the Western powers both of which sat back and did nothing. Rather it was an invading military force led by the Rwandan Paul Kagame that brought peace and stability to the country. Nowadays of course the West are critical of Kagame’s grip on power and of his abuse of ‘human rights’. I feel like saying ‘How dare they!’ The days of US/European judgment of post colonial states for their human rights compliance are well and truly over. One of the tragedies of the Palestinian people is that they have no Kagame, only endless dead and a handful of old men and autocrats in the pockets of the Americans and the Israelis. For all its good intentions the ICJ are just men and women in robes not an enforcing body. And what good could such a body do, at a time when the Security Council’s very own force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, is being threatened and openly attacked by Israel.


If someone were to write it, any new volume on Anti-Terrorism and Genocide would no doubt have chapters on anti anti-terrorism laws, anti-genocide laws for sure: new trade sanctions, new controls on investment, the further realisation in law of boycott strategies and the like. This is all to be applauded, my home country Ireland pre-eminent among the drivers for this kind of accountability: Ireland is that rarity a global North country that having been colonised knows what its effects are. But where will the Palestinian people be by the time such a book gets written? Where will liberalism be? Where will international law be?


Conor Gearty
LSE
24 October 2024

Law, Misc, Talks

Human Rights After Gaza

This is the annual human rights lecture at the Las Casas Institute in Oxford that I gave on 2 May 2024


The Context

Approximately 1,400 Israelis and other nationals were killed on and after 7 October 2023, according to figures reported by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), most of them civilians, including multiple members of the same family, women and numerous children. Some 224 hostages were seized, including at least one person with a disability, women, children, elderly people and Israeli soldiers.

In response, Israel ‘declared war’ on Hamas. Since then, the Israeli army has dropped thousands of US-made 2000-pound bombs on Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on Earth, home to 2.1 million Palestinians, of whom approximately half are children, and the majority of whom are refugees from villages and towns now within Israel. At least 34,000 Palestinians have been killed thus far and over 70,000 injured in Gaza. Seventy percent of recorded deaths have been women and children. Human rights groups including Amnesty International have recorded multiple instances of ‘entire families [being] wiped out in Israeli attacks even after they sought refuge in areas promoted as safe and with no prior warning from Israeli authorities’. Groups of starving Palestinian civilians waiting for food aid have been killed, as have those supplying the aid. Strikes on UNRWA facilities have led to the deaths of 400 people seeking shelter under the UN flag. At least 165 employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (‘UNRWA’) have been killed as well as multiple journalists and leaders of Gaza’s now destroyed university sector. As I write, the bombing of northern and central Gaza has been resumed and the Israeli Defence Forces appear readied for an assault on southern Gaza where the vast majority of displaced Palestinians are now huddled.

The wilful violation of multiple human rights here is remarkable, with the remarks I have just made barely scratching the surface. What of the world’s main human rights cheerleaders? The US government continues to support this Israeli campaign of retributive violence with vast amounts of military aid and (at the United Nations) continued political cover. The European Union and most of its national leaders maintain their close links with Israel while doing nothing that might prevent or even merely inhibit or delay the ongoing destruction. The Parliamentary Assembly of that beacon of human rights hope, the Council of Europe, unquestioningly retains Israel as an Observer State, enjoying all sorts of favours within the organisation and able to choose which bits of its work in which to involve itself and which not (like, of course, human rights). The Council of Europe believes, it would seem, that the State ‘accepts the principles of democracy. the rule of law and the enjoyment by all persons within its jurisdiction of human rights and fundamental freedoms’, the condition for the award of such a favoured status. But then Israel is happily appearing in the Eurovision Song Contest in Malmo on 7-11 May, and is participating in European football competitions and are now in Horizon Europe, ‘joining hands for a better future’ as the Mission of Israel to the EU and NATO put it in October 2022. Imagine if this were the Hutus in Rwanda, or the Yugoslavia of Milosevic, or – to pick a recent example not even arguably engaged in genocide – Putin’s Russia.

Human Rights Origins

How can the idea of human rights retain its current shape in light of what has been happening? To know where our subject is headed it is important to know where it has come from. The story is less unambiguous, more conflicted, less Whiggish, and more entwined with imperialism than we might suppose or want. Starting points reveal perspective and mine is to be found right here, in this Institute, in the person after whom it is called. As your website puts it, ‘Bartolomé de las Casas OP was a sixteenth-century business entrepreneur in the Spanish Empire who, when confronted by the suffering of indigenous peoples, became a Dominican friar and began to campaign as an opponent of genocide in the “new world” and a vocal advocate for human rights.’ Launching this Institute sixteen years ago I called him, not hyperbolically I hope, the ‘founder of human rights’.

In the centuries since de las Casas, and following him in spirit, human rights have been a way of getting the powerful to see people (the poor, persons with disabilities, indigenous peoples, the colonised) whom it does not otherwise notice, as humans. This is the original ‘consciousness-raising’ that I believe is the essence of human rights – a forced broadening of our understanding of what it means to be human, with all that it is hoped follows from this newly achieved empathy. Human rights adds entitlement to this compassion, asserting a right to the life chances which it was thought previously depended solely on kindness or charity from the privileged.

But how to get people unaffected by oppression to listen to this surely unwelcome message, to see what they would prefer to avoid? De las Casas was no marginalised figure himself; he was a propagandist of genius with (as we would put it today) access to and influence on those in circles of imperial power. His propagandic genius was to turn the Spanish empire’s own doctrine of morality against itself, revealing injustices that had previously been ignored. In the late 19th century, the Anglo-Irish diplomat Roger Casement did the same thing, reporting on imperial violence and dehumanisation from Congo, Peru and, eventually, from his own country, Ireland. The British lauded him when he was reported on Belgian or Spanish-led atrocities, but when he turned the same anti-imperial ethic towards the British Empire, his fate was sealed. In an echo of what we see today among the leaders of the US and the EU, the powers that be often condemn violence by other imperial forces but remain in a state of denial about the violence caused by their actions or that of their allies.

The centrality of the term ‘human rights’ drew a huge lift from its adoption as a core part of the United Nations, newly established in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. This was when human rights started getting defined as particular obligations, things that states were obliged not to do (torture; kill the innocent; commit genocide; restrict civil liberties) but also actions that they had to take (shelter their people; feed and hydrate them) if their citizens were to have the chance to lead decent lives. As had happened with the campaigns against slavery and crimes of war, law crept in, ‘declarations of intent’ first of all (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) but then growing via the internationally agreed covenants of 1966 and the various protocols that followed, together with many other agreements promoting the interests of the previously unnoticed, into something grander and more ambitious than had previously been achieved. Here was the de las Casas de nous jours, the bully pulpit for the marginalised to which all states had promised to listen.

But the nagging human rights question remained: how could the powerful absorb the obligations of human rights in this way without compromising their own (often imperial) positions, without damaging the inequality and injustice upon which their prosperity so often depended, both at home and abroad? Human rights victories have never been complete: slavery was replaced by entirely legalised indentured service and international humanitarian law had weak to non-existent enforcement mechanisms.

There has been a duplicity to human rights ever since they arrived on this global stage, a whiff of hypocrisy. From the outset, the UN promised never to question what the countries signing up to its Charter did at home – domestic autonomy was a guaranteed trump card. Stalin’s Soviet Union was in at the start and Mao’s China was a key member through the last years of that leader’s life. The 1948 UN declaration was all (deliberately) fine words, safely inoculated against any possible enforcement and so easy to support: none voted against. When the European Convention on Human Rights went further down the legally enforcement route, in 1950, the colonies were carefully left out if the signatories so desired, or submerged in emergency get-out clauses if they were not. The Charter of the UN and its various human rights treaties were successfully concluded precisely because they came without proper judicial oversight. But this sort of hypocrisy is not to be entirely deplored: it has a value. It creates space for the cohort of UN special representatives and rapporteurs to tour the world doing their good human rights work, like latter day missionaries of the de las Casas sort, waving not the bible but the UN charter in front of their national audiences and demanding they live by the human rights book to which they have all promised to adhere. Shame can produce change even without a court order.

Law’s Empire

This brings me to one arena of human rights protection that has managed to secure more robust enforcement than those that have relied for their power on mere shaming. This is international criminal law. Things have changed somewhat since the 1909 case of the radical Indian nationalist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. He published an article in Britain praising an assassination of a Raj official as an act of patriotism. He was arrested and detained in the UK; while being shipped back to India as a prisoner, he escaped at Marseilles, claiming a right as a political prisoner to sanctuary, something that was clearly established in the domestic law of the UK, and wider international law. Yet, the British got him back with the assistance of unwitting local police. The matter came before the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague two years later, which refused to return Savarkar to France. There had been an ‘irregularity’ it was true but no rule of international law demanded such mistakes be rectified. The five decision-makers in the case were British, French, Norwegian, Dutch and Belgian.

Times have largely changed since the days when the colonial powers could blithely determine the legality of their own actions. It is no longer as easy as it was to deploy international law in this explicitly partisan fashion. It has taken a while but the momentum has been away from colonial/neo-colonial control. After the Second World War the victorious allies found a way to describe their beaten opponents as war criminals – Nuremburg and Tokyo gave us the idea of prosecuting former leaders of places that had committed what we now called war crimes and crimes against humanity. These defeated opponents were arrested, tried and punished (often with death). Around the same time, a Convention of 1948 delivered an unequivocal condemnation of genocide, not creating a special court to prosecute wrongdoers but at least empowering the International Court of Justice, established the year before, to adjudicate on disputes between signatory states on any aspect of its terms. In the 1990s, a special UN tribunal was set up to try those guilty of particularly heinous crimes in the former Yugoslavia. The International Criminal Court for Rwanda followed, and then in 1998 a whole new regime was created to punish political leaders and others in a new court of law for commission of the ‘most serious crimes of international concern’, namely genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression. Of course, just as with the Genocide Convention before it, states have to sign up before they can be bound by the International Criminal Court (‘ICC’), but many do and so are notionally bound by these international rules.

Law has a way of escaping its controlling roots. For all their fixing of the jurisdiction of the bodies overseeing operation of the European Convention on Human Rights, the British in the 1950s found themselves in an ugly dispute about their behaviour in Cyprus (with Greece taking the side of the at that point still colonised Cypriots). Subsequent cases involving Ireland followed with routine state violence against insurgents in Northern Ireland being condemned by no less a body than the European Court of Human Rights itself. Since then, the British authorities have been dogged by domestic as well as regional human rights litigation requiring compensation for those abused in past colonial conflicts in Africa or demanding investigation into contemporary abuses in modern day Iraq and Afghanistan. The Americans have also been drawn in, facing censure in cases brought under the now slightly legalised international human rights regime for abuses incurred in the war on terror, while its European allies have been similarly caught out for helping administer the black sites (where torture was rife) or assisting in the kidnapping of terrorist suspects from the streets of European urban centres. Not even a retired dictator can live out his life in safety any longer, as the Chilean dictator consistently supported by the United States General Pinochet discovered when he was arrested in a London hospital in 1998.

One of the most dramatic advances of recent decades in the international field has been how law, and its theoretical under-pinner ‘the rule of law’, has become more autonomous, more independent of the powers that first imagined them. The story that law now tells itself is of a body of work in search of its own legal truth, beholden to no-one, answering only to this or that foundational text that determines its remit. Laws last when the fashion that gave rise to them falls away. The grand language of past eras, of post-1945 human rights, of post-Cold War optimism about punishing human rights abusers, finds continued salience long after the confident idealism that gave birth to such initiatives has faded away. Much like the idea of equal humanity that de las Casas argued for, the ideal of the rule of law now has something of the quality of enabling the powerless and vulnerable to throw the morals of the powerful right back at them. To paraphrase the infamous tax avoiding millionaire Leona Helmsey, obedience to the law might once have been ‘for the little people’. No longer.

Israel and human rights

Returning to the case of Gaza, can the ideals of human rights embodied in law and embracing punitive action for egregious breaches offer support to the vulnerable, offer even justice? We shall soon find out.
I mentioned earlier Israel’s engagement with the Council of Europe. Israel has long been expert at the cherry-picking of its international obligations. But the state could hardly skip membership of the United Nations that gave birth to it and could hardly avoid too committing itself to the Genocide Convention, agreed as it was so soon after the Jewish people had suffered their own, terrible Holocaust.

This does not mean that the State supports the international community of course. Its attitude to the UN has been on crude display during the conflict in Gaza, condemning nearly all UN fact finding as at best ill-informed, at worst the work of anti-Semitic Hamas apologists. Israel has paid some $10 million dollars to the UN in compensation for damage done to its buildings in previous attacks on Gaza. Already in this short conflict over 150 UN employees have been killed, I think an unprecedented number. Belgium had its development agency building in Gaza destroyed by an Israeli attack, twenty-four hours after it had decided to continue to fund the United Nationals Relief Agency in Gaza, resisting pressure to follow the US, the UK, Germany, Canada and Japan and eleven other Member States in defunding the agency, removing some $450m from their balance sheet.


Why on earth withdraw support from the only plausible relief organisation operating in a territory whose civilian population was being subjected to unprecedented levels of bombing and destruction?

The answer takes us back not to the UN this time but to law and the Genocide Convention. An independent report commissioned on 5 February following Israeli allegations of UNRWA support for Hamas reported last month, and in the course of vindicating the Agency observed that Israel ‘had yet to provide supporting evidence’ of the allegations it had made. These allegations had apparently ‘surfaced’ (the report’s own word) in January. This ‘surfacing’ had happened at exactly the time that the International Court of Justice gave its preliminary ruling in the case alleging genocide brought by the Republic of South Africa. The Court ruling was on 26 January, and that was the day that UNRWA received the first allegations from Israeli officials regarding the alleged involvement of 12 UNRWA staff in the 7 October attack against Israel. On 28 January the New York Times ran its usual long and supportive story citing Israeli sources detailing the level of alleged complicity in its characteristically graphic terms.

Israel is expert at these contrived scandals, designed to divert. It was right to be worried about the South African case. The bar to prove genocidal intent is high but apparently oblivious of the international implications Israel appears determined to scale it. Why else embark on what looks very like a policy of forced starvation if that is not the case? Normally those accused of genocide hide from authority and when arrested disclaim all responsibility for the horrors of which they are accused. Israeli leaders have taken a different route, celebrating mass destruction, promising more, and relying on the guarantees of impunity they believe they continue to enjoy from Global North power. But are they missing the move away from US global hegemony and towards an independent rule of law to which I earlier referred?
Arrest is not something the ICJ can order. But the Chief Prosecutor at the ICC can do so. Naturally Israel did not sign up to the Rome Statute, but the fact that Palestine is now a Party means that their actions in Gaza expose them to action by the ICC: a ruling of the court handed down before 7 October 2023 confirms the possibility. And the ICC does not need genocide to act; mere war crimes and crimes against humanity will do. The principle behind the ICC is that of individual responsibility, right up to and including the leadership behind the crimes being alleged. The Russian leader Vladamir Putin has already been indicted. How can Benjamin Netanyahu not be, together with his senior political allies and the IDF leadership, as well as countless other lower level personnel whose apparent war crimes have been a source of pride to them, flaunted on social media? Warrants are indeed said to be imminent. The usual accusations of anti-Semitism have come from the Israeli prime minister; there are reports that he is terrified of what lies in store.

Human rights after Gaza

The future of our subject as a plausibly universal idea supported by sovereign powers may well depend on the ICC prosecutor Karim Khan. If warrants for the Israeli leadership are issued and Netanyahu and some of his senior political and military officers are arrested on a trip abroad or (more likely as has often been the case with African countries) handed over by successor regimes, then regardless of outcome the jurisdiction will have proved its worth. If the ICJ delivers a verdict condemning Israel’s conduct in Palestine and perhaps even castigates its conduct as genocidal, then as with an ICC outcome of the sort just referred to we can say that the system is not rigged to protect the powerful, that all are vulnerable, even those with the Global North resolutely on their side.

Even if neither of these happens, if law does not rise to the occasion, then other options remain. The performative power of the ICJ hearings, seen on television around the world, were persuasive even without a court order: the slow deliberate analysis of the South African team, all emotion bottled into a series of devastating phrases, up against the old guy losing his way in the papers and making little sense even when believing he was on top of his brief. The judges in their grand judicial gowns and ranged on one side of their grand table looked as the peoples of the world should look if we were to take a random selection of fifteen, all nationalities, all colours, all languages.

The shame of these proceedings should have been enough for Israel to draw breath. But shame – an essential part as I have said of the human rights repertoire – appears not to work with contemporary Israel. It, its leadership and its supporters around the world appear to have convinced themselves that none of what is happening is Israel’s fault – that Hamas are solely responsible, and anyway even if it is Israel’s responsibility it is anti-Semitic to call the country out in the way its critics do, that the suffering of their ancestors gives them a blank cheque today.

Tougher measures are required, and they are coming – from the bottom up. Israel’s artistic and cultural engagements with the outside world are coming under pressure, with organisers finding themselves forced to deny Israel participation or lose their events. Malmo next week should be a reminder of the days when apartheid South Africa saw its European sporting events disrupted, The extraordinary protests on US campuses shame those of us in Europe who collude in continuing to treat Israel as a normal academic partner: a recent book by Maya Wind (Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom) has demonstrated the collusion between the country’s universities and its increasingly barbaric occupations, of both Gaza and the West Bank. The churches, led by the estimable Pope Francis, are reaching across sectarian divides to build new alliances with their Muslim co-religionists. Disinvestment campaigns are taking off everywhere. Israel is at risk – a substantial risk in my opinion – of becoming a pariah State, its own actions disowned not only in the Global South, but across the whole of progressive opinion in the Global North too.
This is not a clash between South and North: it is between corrupted power and (to use proudly a hackneyed term) ‘the people’. We must celebrate social media for showing us what has been happening in real time. When the Lebanese Christian militias murdered (with IDF support) unknown numbers of Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and Shatila after Israelss brutal siege of Beirut of 1982, no cameras recorded the massacre in real time. No longer.

But social media carries its own risks, reflective of a wider hollowing out of a global audience’s capacity to focus on anything for any length of time. What happens when the killing finally stops, when the global community comes in to try to rebuild Gaza after Israel’s latest bout of destruction? Will the supporters of the Palestinians move on to their next cause, forgetting the passion they will have now spent and forsaking the cause that seemed so central just a short while before. Will some successor of Netanyahu receive the Nobel peace prize from an exhausted world, glad it has all stopped. Will Blinken join the late Dr Kissinger in such hallowed ranks?

The future of human rights depends on none of this happening. I have spent little time here on ordinary civil and political rights, and even less on the economic and social rights necessary to make a full life possible. These are utterly and in almost every way disregarded by Israel so far as Palestinians in the occupied territories are concerned (and also for many Palestinians within Israel). There is a reason why both of the UN human rights covenants of 1966 start with a people’s right to self-determination: without freedom human rights do not stand a chance.

The future of human rights depends on Israel being driven to recognise the need for a State of Palestine, and then to make the necessary changes to bring this about. For if large sections of a people can be destroyed with utter impunity by Global North military power, their culture destroyed, their lives eviscerated by deliberate destruction, if all this is possible, why should irregular asylum seekers not be next, and then asylum seekers proper, and then refugees and then – who knows? Martin Niemöller’s famous warning about for whom authoritarianism comes and in what order should be echoing in our ears, plausible more than ever since the 1930s, especially now at this time when a new, nasty brutalism is in the air.

Misc

Shami Chakrabarti on human rights

Human Rights. The Case for the Defence (Allen Lane 2024)

(A preview of a forthcoming book review in the Irish Times)


In the middle of writing this review I heard Shami Chakrabarti on the radio, eviscerating some confused Tory advocate of the UK’s proposed new law to remove a few asylum seekers to Rwanda. Chakrabarti was courteous throughout, her politeness serving only to maroon her opponent ever deeper in contradictions of his own making. The exchange brought back happy memories of peak Chakrabarti, the young, brilliant women from a diverse background holding forth fearlessly in defence of civil liberties on this or that TV show at a time when everyone watched the same programmes. This was when a supposedly socialist government was brutally disrupting basic liberties in its pursuit of those whom it suspected were linked to Islamic terrorism: at times it seemed that only Shami (as everyone everywhere called her) and her Liberty cohort of young activists stood between government and a police state. Departure from Liberty was followed by a brief engagement with Jeremy Corbyn’s inner circle which did not go well. But it did lead to her securing a seat in the House of Lords where she takes the Labour whip and continues to cause mischief, these days from within rather than without the corridors of power.

Chakrabarti also now writes books, albeit (as here) not exactly boasting about her elevation into the fabricated aristocracy that is the current house of lords (though she clearly likes the place despite herself: her acknowledgements contain an array of those she has met there even if they all come heavily disguised by use of their pre-ennoblement names). The theme of this volume is universal rather than local human rights, and Chakrabarti is excellent on the historical origins of her subject and how it took off in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. The book is at its best showing how the idea of human rights can have a direct bearing on the problems of today, whether they be about war, climate change, poverty or artificial intelligence. In Chakrabarti’s hands, the underlying values are what matter about human rights, forming a road-map to civilised living at a time of change and crisis. I cannot offhand think of a better, more attractive introduction to the subject for those curious to know more about it than the occasional newspaper headline.

Chakrabarti cleverly embraces within the book’s wider remit a robust reassertion of the value of the British Human Rights Act, a law passed in the early, idealistic phase of the Blair/Brown hegemony. This is the measure that will forever be associated with Chakrabarti. Increasingly excoriated since enactment by a plethora of government ministers, its critics now include most Tories and a succession of Conservative prime ministers, the sort of people who want such rights for everyone in the world – except those over whom they themselves have direct control.

A modest and rather legalistic measure, the Human Rights Act continues to draw especial ire on account of its connection to the European Convention on Human Rights, overseen by the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights. The judgments of that court, of which Irish jurist Síofra O’Leary is president, play an influential but not authoritative role in how the UK law is interpreted. Tories and their fellow-travelling lost imperialists are not strong on detail (the Strasbourg tribunal has nothing to do with the EU for example, a basic point they still frequently miss) but they are bright enough to spot the word ‘European’ in the Convention, and also the term ‘human rights’ which feels to them (schooled as they are in their uniqueness) vaguely continental, possibly even French (they have mostly heard of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and can place it in the Paris of 1789, more or less.)

In the years when what we now call Brexit was regarded by all political leaders as the obsession of lunatics, antagonism to European human rights became an easy way for David Cameron and colleagues like Theresa May to show that though they were in favour of staying in the EU, really in their hearts they hated foreigners. Then Brexit marked defeat of the true enemy, though the UK’s win in 2016 makes Pyrrhus’s triumph against the Romans in Asculum (which destroyed his forces) look like not such a bad result by comparison. For all their taking back of control, the Tories cannot even shake free of the European Convention, being bound to it by a desperate Foreign Office keen to meet important Europeans at least now and again, and by US and European intransigence on the issue of the British border on the island of Ireland.

By focusing on human rights as a universal rather than local idea, Chakrabarti does a fine job in indirectly showing how deluded the arguments against UK human rights law is and how vital it is to defend the law. Protecting the Act is a last stand for the culture of equality and dignity which Chakrabarti so ably presents in this book, and from which a counter-attack for a better, more cosmopolitan Britain might conceivably be made at some point in the future. The same is true of the world in general, where the idea of human rights could in the right hands act as a passport out of populist madness.

Chakrabarti has an enviable writing style, her fluency in print matching her bewitching speaking skills; many times I could hear her voice coming through the text. I found myself wondering (perhaps as she does?) whether these skills could indeed be better deployed (as clearly she once thought) within a Labour government. But the thought of her, say, having to justify the inaction of a Starmer administration in the face of Israel’s destruction of the Palestinian people, or some other travesty of human rights values, fills me with anticipatory horror. Shami is better off where she is, pugilistic in her defence of human rights, a key high priest in this, the most important of our secular religions.