Rule of Law

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Tuesday 26th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I also beg the indulgence of the House. I did not want the day to pass without also paying tribute to my special friend, my noble and learned friend Lady Smith, who made a wonderful maiden speech. She will be a great Minister, I have absolutely no doubt. As the House will come to know, she is not just a brilliant lawyer and a person with a very sharp mind and great insight. She is also incredibly good fun company and I recommend that all noble Lords should get to know her.

I also welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Laing. She was a great inspiration when she was in the other place and to have her adorning this House is also a great pleasure.

I want to emphasise something I mentioned earlier today. The principles of the rule of law have been expounded in this wonderful debate, but the main thing to emphasise is that to have the confidence of the public—whether in this country or internationally—courts have to be seen to be just and fair and the law has to be applied in a way that is impartial. No one should enjoy impunity. No one is above the law. To repeat the words of the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, wealth, power, status and privilege should in no way influence, for example, the issuing of warrants.

I was invited to be on the external evidence review panel for the International Criminal Court in relation to the warrants issued against Hamas, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Minister Gallant. It is not unusual for an independent panel to be invited to review evidence to see whether it reaches thresholds and to make sure external eyes are being applied. I was part of that panel, which comprised a number of very distinguished lawyers; I do not put myself in that category.

We were in the hands of the most remarkable man, Theodor Meron. He is a Holocaust survivor; his parents were murdered in the camps. He managed, as a child of 13, to be given a home with a Jewish family in Palestine. They brought him up. He went to the Hebrew University, then to Havard and then Cambridge. He went back and was a government lawyer of great esteem in Israel. He was then an Israeli ambassador and became the president of the court that tried the cases that came out of the horrors of Yugoslavia and that war. He is a great war crimes lawyer. Being in his company and being led by him was like being in a masterclass. The other lawyers were Adrian Fulford, a retired Lord Justice of Appeal from this country, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, a very distinguished government lawyer, Amal Clooney, Danny Friedman, myself and two very distinguished leading academics from the field of war crimes scholarship.

We reviewed the evidence, which is what I have spent my life doing—reviewing evidence to see whether it reaches the thresholds required at different stages in a case. I say in response to the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, who is a colleague in the law, that this was not about equivalence. It was quite different. The warrants for the Hamas leaders were very different from the Israeli ones. They were individuals who had held real responsibility; these were not allegations about disproportionality of the conduct of the war—it was very specifically about the failure to provide humanitarian aid, water and so on, and the creation of starvation and malnutrition.

I just wanted the House to know that I had played that role. We cannot have impunity for certain people. There are no children of a lesser god. A very high percentage of children have died, and we have to make sure that there is a just process. That is what the International Criminal Court is there to provide.