Rules-based International Order

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I too pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, for introducing this debate and for doing so brilliantly. It is so important that we recognise why the world embarked on a moral course after the Second World War. It was designed to prevent war. It was designed to prevent the escalation of conflicts into war, to prevent the commission of atrocity crimes and acts of gross inhumanity, and to create a better world. It was out of that sense of altruism that we saw the creation of institutions which have lasted until now.

Even though we have a changed world, as the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, has described, those institutions matter. The creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was based on a set of shared values of that time, and the International Bar Association—I declare an interest as director of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute—was set up at the same time to bring together lawyers from around the world and all the bar associations of the world to ensure that the law was respected, and that law was part and parcel of that new order.

We followed up with the renewal of the Geneva conventions, seeing that they were not delivering just and fair war. The bombing of Dresden is an example: the new Geneva conventions made after the war said that total bombardments such as that of Dresden amounted to collective punishment of civilian populations and should not happen, and that there had to be rules for the conduct of war. Then there were the subsequent conventions to prevent genocide, to protect refugees and to eliminate discrimination against women—we know so many of them. The idea was that “never again” did not apply to just one community; it applied to all of humanity. We should never again stand by while human beings were subjected to terrible crimes.

For over 70 years, the memory of that war seared the minds of my parents’ generation until they died, and indeed of my generation because we were the children of that. We knew the stories of our parents fighting in the war and enduring the bombings of their homes. My mother lost her home and was left with small children while my father was in the Army abroad. Those experiences created empathy for those who suffered around the world, and that was why having a rules-based order mattered so much.

The noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, tells us that the world has changed, and that is true. We have seen a difference in the position of Russia evolving into a criminal mafia-run state. China is authoritarian still but wants to be a market player. Both of those are on the Security Council and blocking many of the things that that one would want to see being done. So it is true that there needs to be change in some of those institutions, but what does not need to change is the commitment to justice and peace.

There has to be accountability, as the noble Lord, Lord Thomas said, if there is to be justice. That means there has to be law. There have to be courts and prosecutions. In the same way that domestically we need to have courts in order to resolve disputes and deal with crime that affects our communities, there have to be international courts to deal with the ways in which states behave towards each other, regulating relationships internally and domestically as well as externally and internationally.

All this has been documented in other speeches, but we somehow did not expect democracies to be dismissive of the rules. However, we are now seeing democracies being created where there are populist nationalist Governments or isolationist Governments who are interested only in their own sovereignty. After the war, there was a recognition that a certain amount of pooling of sovereignty was essential if we wanted to make a better world and we needed to have international law; law has to apply. However, the institutions that maintain democracy are under attack because we have new kinds of Governments, and I am afraid that many of them do not believe in the importance of law. We have seen in Hungary the capture of the judiciary, for example; while in the United States we are seeing something similar, where the judiciary is supposed to deliver what the President or Government of the day want. The independence of the judiciary has been abandoned.

There are attacks on the media, or appropriation of the media so that it is owned by friends of the Government, which means that corruption and crimes by the state are not exposed. Then there is the whole business of the dismissal of civil servants who are fulfilling their independent status. We are denuding democracies of the checks and balances that are essential to just societies.

I reiterate what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, about the importance of multilateralism and partnerships in our world. That is the only way in which we can have a world that will create peace and justice. However, I would say that it is the economic model of neoliberalism that has allowed money, not our common humanity, to become the supreme value.

Markets, as we know, know no morality; they are amoral. It is we who have to inject morality into markets, but then we hear from someone such as the noble Lord, Lord Frost, about market fundamentalism being the name of the game today. What that has done is create huge gaps between the rich and the poor. It has created a whole cadre of billionaires in our world, so rich that they can buy government—or whatever they want—and now running the technologies which are corrupting our democracies.

The whole business of that combination of neoliberal economics—low-tax economies, getting rid of welfare, every man for himself—is about deregulation. That is what the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, was talking about: deregulation is the name of the new order being created and we have to resist it. That is why it is so important that our Government are standing by the rule of law and the role of international courts.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, for initiating the debate. Yesterday, I met her in the lift. She said, “I’d like to thank you for your contribution tomorrow”. I said, “Hang on; wait till you’ve heard it and then you can decide”.

I have spent most of my life in some part of foreign policy. I was in the European Parliament for 25 years. I spent five years in the Council of Europe and 15 doing odd jobs for the European Commission. As such, I have seen quite a lot of the world—some 90 countries in all, some of them more times than I would have liked.

I start by giving an example from the Council of Europe. One of the problems with the international order is that it sometimes gets beyond itself. For three years, I was the chair of the Council of Europe committee for the implementation of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. Of course, everybody says, “Oh, Russia never carried out any decisions”. That is wrong. The worst offender was Italy and the second worst was Turkey. The Russians were not too bad at carrying out decisions of the court that had no real political consequences. Beyond that, they were not very good at all.

I was on that committee when we debated the court’s decision to enforce prisoners’ votes in Britain, which David Cameron—now the noble Lord, Lord Cameron—said made him sick. I did quite a bit of work on this. One of the things I discovered was that most of the judges who had voted that Britain should give votes to prisoners came from countries that gave no rights to prisoners at all. Secondly, many of those judges did not understand the English prison system. In particular, they did not understand the difference between a remanded and a convicted prisoner. Thirdly, when it came down to it, they were open to negotiation. Thanks to the great skill of David Lidington, we managed to solve the case, get the judgment amended and accepted so that, once again, Britain was a country with no outstanding judgments. I mention this because there has been a lot of mission creep in international jurisdiction, which I do not think has done international law a tremendous amount of good.

The Court of Justice of the European Union and the WTO are unique in being courts committed to a very central, tightly drawn range of circumstances, but some of the other courts—including the International Criminal Court—have a tendency to go well beyond where it is sensible for them to go. I see that some noble Lords object to that. To issue an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu is downright foolish, because it will not be implemented. It undermines the authority of the court. People look at it and say, “What a bunch of jokers. Surely, they don’t expect Netanyahu to get off the plane in London and be banged up by the British coppers”.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

Does the noble Lord know that, when a warrant was issued for Kenyatta, he got on a plane, went to The Hague, submitted himself to the court and said, “I’m here to answer it. I have a defence to this”? It gave him permission to return to his country and to continue to lead it before there were eventually hearings. Why does Mr Netanyahu not do that? You have to remember that the warrant is in relation not to his conduct of the war but his refusal to allow humanitarian aid into the country to feed the population.