Former U.K. Supreme Court justices wrote to the prime minister telling him to cease arms sales to Israel amid a “plausible genocide” in Gaza and also stunningly called for sanctions against Israeli leaders, reports Joe Lauria.
U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Oct. 19, 2023. (Simon Walker / No 10 Downing Street, CC BY 2.0)
By Joe Lauria
in London
Special to Consortium News
More than 600 British lawyers, academics and retired senior judges — including three who sat on the country’s Supreme Court — have written to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak imploring him to “end through lawful means acts giving rise to a serious risk of genocide,” namely, to stop arming Israel while it carries out its atrocities in Gaza.
The letter on Wednesday comes in the wake of leaked audio recordings revealing that the British government is ignoring the advice of its own lawyers not to continue supplying weapons to Israel for its Gaza operation.
“The ICJ [International Court of Justice]’s conclusion that there exists a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza has placed your government on notice that weapons might be used in its commission and that the suspension of their provision is thus a ‘means likely to deter’ and/or ‘a measure to prevent’ genocide,” the letter to Sunak says.
It warns:
“The UK must take immediate measures to bring to an end through lawful means acts giving rise to a serious risk of genocide. Failure to comply with its own obligations under the genocide convention to take ‘all measures to prevent genocide which were within its power’ would incur UK state responsibility for the commission of an international wrong, for which full reparation must be made.”
The 17-page letter at first gives lip service to the governments’ calls for increased aid and a pause in fighting, and then blasts Sunak for “the sale of weapons and weapons systems to Israel,” telling him that “to maintain threats of suspending UK aid to [the U.N. relief agency] Unwra falls significantly short of your government’s obligations under international law.”
In what previously seemed unimaginable, the letter calls for sanctions to be imposed “upon individuals and entities who have made statements inciting genocide against Palestinians.” That would include the prime minister, president and defense minister of Israel.
MPs Also Warn Government
Conservative MPs and the public are also putting pressure on Sunak, especially after an Israeli airstrike deliberately killed seven foreign aid workers this week, including three Britons.
The Guardian reported:
“Three Tory backbenchers and one former minister now in the Lords said that the UK should stop exporting arms to Israel after the airstrike, while the findings of a YouGov poll, conducted before the strike, suggested that the government and Labour are out of step with public sentiment, with a majority of voters – by 56% to 17% – in favour of an arms ban.”
We stand on the verge of a victory on the #Palestinian issue in Britain. Whatever the proximate cause of the imminent collapse of UK support for the #Israeli position it is a cumulation of decades of struggle and endurance by the people who refused to go into the museum, to be an…
— George Galloway MP (@georgegalloway) April 3, 2024
Consequences
While such a move may seem impossible in the United States, it seemed impossible in Britain just weeks ago. There is developing a turn against Israel in this country that could spread across the Atlantic and to the Continent as evidence mounts of Israel’s unconscionable atrocities and seemingly endless impunity.
The developments in Britain give rise to hope that instead an end to it might be in sight.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @unjoe
It won’t happen. Israel owns the political class in this country. They are in too deep to stop now. Starmer’s Labour are as bad if not worse. The UK will become a pariah nation as the balance of a reconfigured world settles. Good.
“While such a move may seem impossible in the United States, it seemed impossible in Britain just weeks ago. There is developing a turn against Israel in this country that could spread across the Atlantic and to the Continent as evidence mounts of Israel’s unconscionable atrocities and seemingly endless impunity.
The developments in Britain give rise to hope that an end to it might indeed be in sight. ”
Excellent points Mr. Lauria.
In Australia our Prime Minister has found himself and the Labor Party government sitting astride a barbed wire fence. On the one hand both the government and the opposition are each 100% behind Israel. However, after the latest developments, following upon the murder of the aid workers in Gaza, they are in a dilemma. This exposes the government as being two faced and rudderless (at the very least embarrassed) and, untrustworthy.
Jack
Further to my posting I failed to point out that the PM and government have been named as aiding genocide; the evidence is irrefutable. The opposition also openly supports genocide. The PM is attempting a clumsy U – turn on this matter. I further point out that Australia is currently supplying military supplies to Israel in support of the invasion of Gaza. Australia is actively aiding what is genocide and there is no defence or any mitigating factors.
Jack
It is a good first step to establish just laws. However, there is a huge second step; enforcing those laws. Our governments have a long established habit of ignoring laws or circumventing them when they choose to.
Surely the political showtrial of Julian Assange is proof enough that Law itself has transmogrified, and been weaponized and upgraded into international Lawlessness; encouraged and led by its leading abuser, Israel, in its pursuit of genocidal crimes against humanity, especially in Gaza!