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.

Gaza: Healthcare System Support

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2025 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to support the healthcare system in Gaza.

[Captain of the King’s Bodyguard of the Yeomen of the Guard and Deputy Chief Whip (Baroness Wheeler) (Lab)]

My Lords, before we start the debate, I remind speakers that they have two minutes and ask them to please stick to that time. We have a lot of speakers to get through and we want to finish the debate on time. Thank you.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, this debate sits comfortably on the back of the debate that we have just heard. Let me immediately set before the House my interests: I am the director of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute. Our work is global: it addresses human rights abuses, and breaches of humanitarian law and the laws of war around the world. We are currently engaged in work on China, Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, Belarus, Sudan and now Syria. We do legal training in many other countries too. At the moment, I am personally co-chairing a task force for President Zelensky of Ukraine on the war crime of the abduction of Ukrainian children by Russia. Warrants were issued by the International Criminal Court and celebrated by many nations.

I was a member of the legal panel which reviewed the evidence that was to be used, by the International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor, to apply for warrants before the court against Hamas and its leadership for the atrocity crimes committed on 7 October—horrifying crimes—and against the Israeli war leaders Netanyahu and Gallant for crimes against the laws of war. That related to the failure to enable access to humanitarian aid for the Palestinian people.

The review involved looking at whether thresholds for evidence had been met, but decisions were always made by the prosecutor’s office. The warrants have now been issued by a court of law, not by the prosecutors. It relates to the impact of the absence of humanitarian aid on the well-being and health of the people of Palestine, of Gaza.

I sought this debate because of the grievous humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the near collapse of the healthcare system, with its enormous consequences for suffering people, and because of my concern that Parliament had been too silent on the suffering of the people in Gaza. We are on the brink of a negotiated ceasefire and, thank God, the release of the hostages. I hope and pray that it may be so. But it should not distract us from the dire immediate need for humanitarian aid for the Palestinian people. Those who are conducting this war on behalf of Israel, or who step in to the role of mediators or peacekeepers in the weeks and months to come, have to enable the immediate delivery of substantial aid.

A huge number of hospitals in Gaza have been destroyed and those which remain can barely function. Many medical staff have been killed. There is very little food and water in the region, and no fuel. A hospital cannot function without electricity for incubators, dialysis machines, operating theatres and sterilisation units. Disease is now rampant in the area because of the gross state of sanitation. The infrastructure of Gaza—from its sewers to its water supply pipes, to its schools, mosques and churches—has been destroyed: it is a moonscape. For over a year, no chlorine has been allowed to enter Gaza.

There is little medicine and virtually no medical supplies. Surgeons have had to operate without anaesthesia. The number of people, especially children, who have lost limbs runs into the thousands. To prevent people bleeding to death, ragged remains of limbs have to be sawn off and sutured. Modern doctors are not trained for the sheer horror of doing this kind of operation with patients who are conscious. Many of the international doctors have testified to the fact that they and other healthcare workers working for international organisations are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of their experiences.

Israel’s debilitation of Gaza’s healthcare system is justified to the world on the basis that there are Hamas military targets within the hospitals, which may well be true. But what humane war leaders are prepared to kill people in their hospital beds or babies in incubators when there is a Hamas presence in a hospital? I will turn to some of the research that has been done on that in a minute.

Some 62% of all the buildings in Gaza have been destroyed. That increases to 80% in northern Gaza. It would be hard to find a single family that has not lost multiple relatives. According to Israel, it has used 70,000 tonnes of bombs, which surpasses the tonnage dropped in Dresden, Hamburg and London combined during the six-year Second World War. The Geneva Convention sought to create new rules of engagement after the horrors of the Second World War, but they seem to count for nothing.

On 10 January, the World Health Organization warned that the Al-Awda hospital, the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza, is so overwhelmed with patients and critically low on essential supplies that care is basically impossible. Damaged roads and insufficient facilitation by the Israeli authorities have made safe access for the WHO impossible. Are we accusing it of making these things up? The UN estimates that, as of 31 December 2024—Christmas time—14,000 patients required medical evacuation abroad in order to meet their needs.

In the emergency debate of the UN Security Council on 3 January, on the humanitarian situation in Gaza, the WHO said that Israeli forces had been conducting a systematic dismantling of the health system in northern Gaza. The WHO has verified that 654 attacks have been made on healthcare facilities. The UN human rights office published a report on 31 December claiming that

“Israel’s pattern of deadly attacks on and near hospitals in Gaza … pushed the healthcare system to the brink of total collapse”,

and that

“The conduct of hostilities in Gaza since 7 October has destroyed the healthcare system in Gaza, with predictably devastating consequences for the Palestinian people”.

The horrors go on. On 8 November 2024, the IPC Famine Review Committee stated:

“Famine thresholds may have already been crossed or else will be in the near future”


in northern Gaza. The UN estimates that 60,000 children will require treatment for acute malnutrition in the course of this year.

Before the conflict, some 500 trucks entered Gaza every day. Now, every single person in Gaza requires humanitarian assistance, but in October, 57 trucks a day were allowed to cross into Gaza on average. Of course, it vacillates, but in this House we keep hearing that looting is the problem, with people taking the aid. No mention is made, I have noticed, of the extent to which attacks have been made on the humanitarian aid trucks by settlers from the West Bank. They have torn down humanitarian aid and overturned lorries, with IDF soldiers looking on, inactive.

A report by 29 NGOs, including Save the Children, Oxfam and others, detailed the looting of aid trucks as an ongoing issue, but called the theft of goods

“a consequence of Israel’s targeting of the remaining police forces in Gaza, scarcity of essential goods, lack of routes and closure of most crossing points, and the subsequent desperation of the population amid these dire conditions”.

Many of the those who are looting are young Palestinians who are trying to get food for their families, their parents and other people suffering in the absence of food.

On 10 January, a study was published in the medical journal the Lancet which estimates that the death toll, which people refer to as 47,000, is higher than that: between 55,298 and 78,525. They have split it in the middle, with a best estimate of 64,420.

Finally, I have just read a book by Omar El Akkad called One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Each generation looks back in judgment at the moral blind spots of earlier generations, and it will happen on this subject too. One day, we will be ashamed of ourselves for our passivity and hypocrisy concerning what has been happening in Gaza. This silence has to be broken.

Israel-Gaza Conflict: Arrest Warrants

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Tuesday 26th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

On both questions, I am afraid that I disagree with the noble Lord. That is not how we view the ICC. We respect the ICC and our obligations as a signatory to it. As for the decisions on export licences, those were made in compliance with UK law.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that there is a misunderstanding by the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, if he thinks that this is a matter concerning proportionality with regard to self-defence? Warrants have been issued very specifically not in relation to disproportionate use of self-defence. They have been issued on the basis of the refusal to allow humanitarian aid to reach the civilian population of Gaza. That was the basis for the warrants being issued: the starvation that follows from that and the impact in particular on young children’s development and survival possibilities.

I want to ask a supplementary question. It is very important that people in this House know that the International Criminal Court is not indicting Israel. It is indicting two of its leaders who have conducted this war. Normally the principle of complementarity would have meant that we would respect the courts of Israel to investigate and deal with the matter. That was blocked by Prime Minister Netanyahu. Do the Government agree that because that avenue of complementarity was not available, after the opportunity had been given for an inquiry or an investigation by the Israeli authorities, warrants were issued for that reason? Does the Minister agree that it is about the people of Palestine being deprived of humanitarian aid?

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

My noble friend is correct in that the warrants are for war crimes of starvation, intentional attacks on civilians and other inhumane acts. I point out to noble Lords that the indictment is not a finding of guilt. It is the start of a process. There would theoretically be a court process that would investigate all the alleged crimes.

China: Human Rights and Sanctions

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Tuesday 29th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

We will continue to lead on this issue where we can in international fora. I am grateful for what the noble Lord said, and we share his concerns on this. But, to reiterate, the Foreign Secretary raised Xinjiang and the Uighur people in China last week, and he will continue to do so because our concerns have not changed since the change of Government. He will continue to raise those issues whenever and wherever he can.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

I will ask the Minister about the situation for parliamentarians in this country who were sanctioned because of raising what was happening to the Uighur community in Xinjiang province. Two Members of this House—myself and the noble Lord, Lord Alton—and five Members of the House of Commons were sanctioned. I understand that that was not raised in the Foreign Secretary’s meeting with the leadership in China. Preserving our right to raise human rights issues, without feeling that there will be consequences for doing so, should concern this House.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

I completely agree with my noble friend, as does the Foreign Secretary. These issues are raised. The sanctions against parliamentarians for things they have said are completely unwarranted and unacceptable. The Foreign Secretary met with Speaker Hoyle before his trip to China to reiterate that this was a concern to him. It is a concern to the Foreign Secretary and to all of us in the Government. It is inappropriate that parliamentarians in this and the other House should be sanctioned in this way, and we will consistently raise this with China.