King’s Speech

Baroness Helic Excerpts

Wednesday 15th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Helic (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome my noble friends the Minister and Lord Roberts. I pay tribute to my noble friends Lord Ahmad and Lady Goldie for their tireless work. I welcome the Foreign Secretary to his role. Having served under his leadership in opposition and in government, I know he will bring experience and steadiness to guide our foreign policy through tough and unpredictable times.

Foreign and domestic policy are mutually reinforcing. Our foreign policy should always seek to create an international climate in which Britain is secure and prosperous and we can find multilateral solutions to global challenges. The foundations for this must be in an international law-based order built around law and human rights. Every foreign policy and security challenge that we face would be easier to address in a world where international law was widely respected and observed. Furthermore, our foreign policy is strongest when it has united support from across countries. In a deteriorating international environment, we need unity, not divisiveness. That requires a steadfast defence of our fundamental democratic values.

Our international influence comes with responsibility, and when and if we fall short the danger is that other nations interpret it as a green light to breach international law in more severe ways and we weaken our ability to resist such breaches. Nowhere has our commitment and that our allies to international law been more under stress than in the Israel/Gaza conflict. Let me be clear: Hamas committed an act of terror and terrorism with executions, the kidnapping of families and reported instances of sexual violence of the most horrific nature. The killing and abuse of civilians can never be justified. It is abhorrent, it is evil and it is cowardly. That is what sets us apart from Hamas and from Russia. We must always hold ourselves to a higher standard and follow international law when we exercise the right of self-defence.

If we have learned anything from the experience of fighting terrorism, from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo, it is that when we depart from international law, we betray our values and we do not protect our country but inflame the very problem we are trying to address. We seem to have forgotten these lessons in our response to the Gaza/Israel crisis. As we speak, Israeli military operations include disproportionate attacks on civilian targets and a deliberate policy of withholding water, electricity, fuel and humanitarian aid, none of which is defensible from a legal or moral point of view.

None of us on any side of your Lordships’ House can claim to have been taken by surprise with these tactics. They were announced in advance when Prime Minister Netanyahu said that the Israel Defense Forces would turn Gaza into rubble and when Major General Alian addressed the population of Gaza saying:

“Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water … there will only be destruction”.


I have no doubt that such statements, and their operational implications, were reported back by our diplomats, yet we still gave unquestioning political support to the operation that unfolded. By being an uncritical friend, we have helped open the door to terrible suffering, with long-term implications for peace in the region and around the world. In a way, we failed Israel. We failed Palestinian civilians as well and, dare I say, we failed the British people too.

International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan KC recently wrote that

“if there is a doubt that a civilian object has lost its protective status, the attacker must assume that it is protected”.

He noted that

“the burden of demonstrating that this protective status is lost rests with those who fire the gun, the missile, or the rocket in question”.

This is a tough task, but it is the task we set ourselves to avoid the horrors and suffering of past conflicts—the call democracies must be able to answer. Human rights and international humanitarian law are not à la carte. We do not get to choose which we like and which we do not, and in which context they apply.

The widest possible adherence to a rules-based order is the best hope we have to achieve peace, security, prosperity and the furtherance of our national interests. I know the Foreign Secretary is a strong proponent of human rights and the rule of law, and I hope he will put defence of both at the heart of his work, and of every area of our foreign policy.