Leading by Example

By Andrew Gilmour

Andrew Gilmour CMG is the former UN assistant secretary-general for human rights, executive director of the Berghof Foundation, and a visiting fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is chair of UN Staff for Gaza, a board member of the Reckoning Project for accountability in Ukraine and of Robert F Kennedy Human Rights, and a senior fellow at SOAS. 

The UK’s double standards at home and abroad are affecting its standing in the world. We need a consistent approach to human rights – and this should be based on international law. 

To use a word mocked by self-styled anti-woke warriors, there appears to be something bizarrely ‘triggering’ about spray paint.  

In May 2020, the final year of the first Trump administration, at a time of major civil protests in the USA, Stephen Miller, one of its officials most hostile to human rights urged, ‘Mr President, they are burning America down… You have an insurrection on your hands.’ 

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, replied with an expletive, and turning to Trump, said, ‘They used spray paint, Mr President. That’s not insurrection.’ He insisted that the Black Lives Matter protests were ‘not an issue’ for the US military to be deployed on the streets of America.1 

In 2025, it seems there are sadly no more Milleys either in the US or the UK. In June, some members of ‘Palestine Action’ broke into a RAF base, damaged property and spray painted two aircraft. The UK government’s response was worthy of Stephen Miller. It proscribed Palestine Action as a ‘terrorist organisation’. It then arrested several hundred peaceful protesters (including elderly vicars) who expressed support for it, in the process making a fool of itself and a mockery of its laws at home and abroad.  

‘The decision appears disproportionate and unnecessary,’ declared the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, with what many felt was understatement. ‘It limits the rights of many people… who have not themselves engaged in any underlying criminal activity but rather exercised their rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association... that is at odds with the UK’s obligations under international human rights law.’2 

For a mid-sized country like the UK, there are advantages in being seen to be a strong supporter of rule of law, international justice, human rights, atrocity prevention and accountability. It also fits with the UK’s comfortable image of itself – home to Magna Carta, mother of parliaments, the Bill of Rights, first to abolish the slave trade, lead prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials, founder of Amnesty International, and a lead role in a number of post-1945 international initiatives to prevent crimes against humanity.  

Prior to the UK general election in 2024, there was much talk of how a new UK government would seek to navigate a much more uncertain international environment. This was characterised by threats to global stability by Russia and China, both of which find themselves strengthened when multilateral institutions and international law are undermined. As they also do by the mounting charges of double standards levelled against Western powers who stood by, or actively supported and supplied, the first-ever genocide to have been carried out by a democratic country – and live-streamed over an extended period.  

‘A war crime is a war crime, and genocide is genocide – whether it is committed by an enemy or an ally’  

As one influential policy brief from Chatham House put it in May 2024, if the UK sought to be a leading voice in global governance, international development and reform of  the multilateral system, the next government ‘should recognise the damage to  the UK’s reputation and influence that occurs when the country disregards (or threatens to  disregard) international agreements’ at home and abroad. Since the UK  has historically championed international law, it undermines other countries’ respect for the rule of law when it  departs from such principles itself. And, it went on, the power of  example is  all the more important in these times, when the postwar system (to which the UK contributed much) is contested so vigorously.3  

In May 2025, the Attorney-General Lord Hermer gave a notable speech.4 At the start he announced he would address – in order to dismiss – the critique of those he described as ‘legal romantic idealists’ on the one hand, and proponents of ‘pseudo-realism’ on the other, before arguing that  British leadership to strengthen and reform the international rules-based system is both the right thing to do and the only truly realistic choice.  

Hermer presented the government’s chosen foreign policy of ‘progressive realism’ as an ideal middle way between the two schools of thought that he professed to knock. Provocatively (and it led to calls for his resignation from the Tory benches), Hermer compared the thinking on the British Right with the unsavoury Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, whose central thesis was in essence the claim that state power is all that counts, not law.5  

One can understand the annoyance of some of his conservative critics, because Hermer’s heart seemed to lie far more in kicking the pseudo-realists while sympathising more with the legal romantic idealists (though he gave a deliberately extreme version of the latter group’s position6 in order to be able to attack them too). This aside, Hermer’s views, even if he was not the attorney general, are worth looking at, because they lay out a convincing government case for why it is essential to reject the ‘siren song’ of rightwing politicians and media that says Britain should abandon the constraints of international law in favour of raw power.            

Hermer says there is a temptation among its critics to see international law as something inflicted upon us by others, as something undemocratic and somehow ‘foreign’. But this line of thinking (which is shared by leaders like Trump, Putin, Orban and Netanyahu, though Hermer does not list them) leads to a world where ‘hunks could be ripped off borders and every dispute be settled by the force of the strong’. It also ignores the reality that states can use international law to protect certain values they hold dear: security of borders, human rights, equality and the rule of law.  

There is one major problem with the attorney-general’s speech, and it is not related to the argument. Rather it lies in the fact that the government in which he serves, despite being headed by a former human rights lawyer, seems to have a highly ambivalent approach to law, justice and rights.  

It is not clear to what extent politicians on either side of the house have taken on board that Britain’s standing in the world – especially when it comes to taking the country seriously on any human rights or justice issue in the years to come – has taken a major knock from on the one hand calling out the Russian invasion of Ukraine together with its indisputable war crimes, and proposing all sorts of escalating sanctions, while on the other hand being relatively muted on Gaza, resisting almost all sanctions and continuing to provide vital military components and intelligence for the Israeli Defense Forces.  

As more and more independent experts and institutions have concluded that the Israeli treatment of Palestinians is not just a series of war crimes and crimes against humanity, but has crossed the threshold of genocide7 as defined in international law, the UK continues to provide many forms of strong support to Israel. This has weakened the position of Israeli moderates and will go down as the first time in our history that the UK government deliberately and systematically aided and abetted a party carrying out a genocide.  

The UK government points out (and it is not alone in this) that international courts need to make a formal ruling on whether what we are witnessing every day on our screens, despite the banning and killing of hundreds of journalists, as well as medics and UN staff members, constitutes genocide. But UK officials are fully aware that the first article of the 1948 Convention on Genocide calls on all state parties not just to punish the perpetrators of genocide after the event, but also to prevent genocide occurring, if there are grounds for believing that it might be happening. Indeed the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has been explicit since January 2024 that the claim of genocide is ‘plausible’.  

To claim that the UK cannot take proper action until the ICJ issues its final judgement – which in light of the court’s notorious slowness might not emerge until 2028, by which time the Israeli government may have tired of the killings and destruction, faced with its growing level of pariah status around the world, and ended them – seems like a deliberate attempt by the UK government to fudge its legal obligation to act to prevent further killings.  

At the end of every genocide, the international community and individual governments tend to say they are very sorry and they ‘didn’t know’, but they will work to ensure it ‘never happens again’. The UK government acts in the same manner, but this time the excuse that ‘we didn’t fully know’ will not be remotely plausible – because with modern communication (which was not available during the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica and Darfur) the atrocities are live-streamed every day.  

Amnesty International UK

Prime Minister Starmer’s human rights background and the attorney general’s speech suggest there is a high level of awareness of what is in the national interest and also the right thing to do. But there is quite a gap between such awareness and the actual behaviour we witness. This can be explained by expediency based on real and understandable fears (such as Nigel Farage capitalising on anti-immigration sentiment, or worry about a mercurial and vengeful US president increasing tariffs). On the other hand, such steps as the 40 per cent cut to the UK aid budget, which was devised and announced shortly before Starmer’s meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, the continued provision of components for the F 35 bombers used with such lethal effect in Gaza,8 and the measures relating to Palestine Action – presumably done also to impress the Trump administration – go well beyond what many observers see as justifiable.  

This is why it is of great importance that a Standing Group on Atrocity Crimes has been launched in July 2025.9 This is an independent initiative dedicated to urgently strengthening the UK’s approach to atrocity prevention and its leadership on international justice. Its goal is to create a unified, effective and enforceable atrocity prediction, prevention and response strategy within the UK government, aligned with existing international legal obligations. It seeks to strengthen UK laws on universal jurisdiction to prosecute international crimes, as well as sanctions legislation. 

It is needed because without some impartial mechanism which would make ministers less afraid to call out powerful perpetrators on their own, there will always be attempts to politicise the government’s response to atrocity crimes. The ideal would be an approach followed by a number of European countries – including Ireland, Norway and Spain – whose leadership has shown the courage to do what they know is right. At the beginning of September 2025, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez in London decried Europe and the west’s double standards over Ukraine and Gaza, describing the latter as ‘one of the darkest episodes of international relations in the 21st century’, and adding that these double standards were unsustainable ‘if we want to increase our credibility when it comes to other sides’.10 

The Standing Group on Atrocity Crimes is expected to lead to a new tool for handling atrocities and genocide. But far preferable, though not mutually exclusive, from a national interest point of view, would be to have a UK government that actually followed its own rhetoric and could be counted on to have the moral courage to understand that a war crime is a war crime, and genocide is genocide – whether it is committed by an enemy of the UK or by an ally. And then to take serious measures to prevent the genocide from escalating. Anything short of that implies a level of complicity and cynicism that both the international community and history will find hard to forgive and forget.  

1 Quoted in Fintan O’Toole, ‘A Show of Force’, New York Review of Books, 24 July 2025

2 Press releases Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. ‘UK: Palestine Action ban “disturbing” misuse of UK counter-terrorism legislation, Türk warns’, 25 July 2025

3 Three foreign policy priorities for the next UK government A case for realistic ambition, Chatham House, 14 May 2024.

4 Attorney General Lord Hermer KC, RUSI Annual Security Lecture, 29 May 2025, www.gov.uk/government/speeches/ attorney-generals-2025-rusi-annual-security-lecture

5 See Richard Elkins, ‘Lord Hermer is preposterously wrong about international law’, Spectator, 30 May 2025

6 For instance claiming that their position is that ‘We should always call out our partners, …. [and] we should always talk to hostile regimes nicely because that will result in them being nicer to us’. He called their position ‘dangerously naïve’, and ‘[p]ositioning ourselves as the pious priest, confining ourselves to the comfort of self-righteous declaration’

7 OHCHR, ‘Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission finds’, press release, 16 September 2025, announcing the Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory

8 Andrew Gilmour, ‘Britain must stop arming Israel now’, Tribune Magazine, 14 May 2025

9 Chaired by Baroness Helena Kennedy KC, ‘it comprises a group of leading international lawyers and cross-party parliamentarians and policy advisers’ (including the author of this paper). www.atrocitystandinggroup.org

10 Sam Jones, Patrick Wintour, Jamie Wilson, ‘Pedro Sanchez: Europe’s response to war in Gaza has been a failure’, The Guardian, 3 September 2025