The international human rights system – the rules, principles and practices intended to ensure that states do not abuse people – is under greater threat now than at any other point since 1945. Fortunately, we in the UK couldn’t wish for a better-qualified prime minister to face this challenge. Keir Starmer is a distinguished former human rights lawyer and prosecutor, with a 30-year career behind him, who expresses a deep personal commitment to defending ordinary people against injustice. He knows human rights law inside out – in fact, he literally wrote the book on its European incarnation – and has acted as a lawyer at more or less every level of the system. (Starmer is the only British prime minister, and probably the only world leader, to have argued a case under the genocide convention – against Serbia on behalf of Croatia in 2014 – at the international court of justice.) He is also an experienced administrator, through his time as director of public prosecutions (DPP), which means he knows how to operate the machinery of state better than most politicians do.
Unfortunately, there’s someone standing in Starmer’s way: a powerful man who critics say is helping to weaken the international human rights system. He fawns over authoritarian demagogues abroad and is seeking to diminish the protections the UK offers to some vulnerable minorities. He conflates peaceful, if disruptive, protest with deadly terrorism and calls for musicians whose views and language he dislikes to be dropped from festival bills. At times, he uses his public platform to criticise courts, whose independence is vital to maintaining the human rights system. At others, he uses legal sophistry to avoid openly stating and defending his own political position, including on matters of life and death. He is, even some of his admirers admit, a ruthless careerist prepared to jettison his stated principles when politically expedient. That person is also called Keir Starmer.
Since the 2024 general election, much ink has been spilled on what Labour is getting wrong in government. But I’ve been puzzled by a slightly different question: why is Labour’s record to date on human rights – the one thing you might expect a Starmer-led government to be rock solid on – so mixed? Over the past six months, I have spoken to more than two dozen sources, including current and former Labour insiders, former legal colleagues of Starmer’s and leading human rights advocates, to try to understand how Starmer the lawyer might be shaping Starmer the prime minister.
Some human rights experts are delighted that, after the scorched-earth years of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, there has been a shift in tone and content. “It is a major achievement,” says Conor Gearty, a professor of human rights law at the London School of Economics and long-term acquaintance of Starmer, “to have stabilised Britain’s commitment to law at a time when the current is flowing the other way internationally.” For the author, barrister and academic Philippe Sands, a prominent critic of the 2003 Iraq war, the UK is belatedly restoring a reputation it shredded two decades ago. “When I’ve gone to meetings in the UN, when I’ve gone to meetings in the Council of Europe, I’ve seen that Britain is once more taken seriously in relation to building a more positive agenda on human rights.” Sands is particularly encouraged by Labour’s commitment to setting up a special tribunal for Russian war crimes in Ukraine, despite the US’s wavering support. Such achievements, Sands and Gearty believe, are in no small part down to Starmer himself. “He does well in a crisis,” says a senior barrister who worked on several cases with Starmer in the 2000s. “That’s what litigators do: they enter the fray at the moment of complete crisis and shitshow.”
Others, to put it mildly, aren’t so keen. Before the election, Starmer told a meeting of Iranian women activists that a Labour government would put human rights at the heart of everything it did. “That’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard,” says a campaigner at a UK charity who regularly meets with ministers and officials. The campaigner reeled off a list of complaints, from policies on migration, policing and protest, to disability benefit cuts and a failure to push harder for an end to Israel’s war in Gaza. Some former colleagues are shocked that Starmer presides over all this. “Given he made his career off a woman who constantly scaled the fences of US bases,” says the criminal defence solicitor Matt Foot, referring to Lindis Percy, a veteran peace activist Starmer represented several times in the 1990s and 00s, “what he’s doing on protest is particularly sickening.”
Staff at several human rights NGOs described encountering a brittle, defensive attitude from ministers in private meetings. “They think the human rights community should put up and shut up,” said one. “There’s a tone as if our agenda is against the interests of UK citizens,” said another, who focuses on international issues. “The line that comes back is that this is irrelevant to ordinary people’s concerns.” All said that this attitude emanated most strongly from officials working for the prime minister, an interpretation echoed by two people familiar with cabinet-level conversations. Several human rights advocates described being made to feel they should just be grateful it was Labour and not the Tories in charge.
How to explain, then, what Yasmine Ahmed, the UK director of Human Rights Watch, described to me as this “split personality approach”? Some government insiders complain about a lack of overall strategy and an insular, macho “boys’ club” surrounding Starmer – frequent criticisms of Labour in recent months – while the human rights advocates I spoke to say some officials are inexperienced. Much of the answer, however, surely resides with Starmer himself, and his own ambiguous politics.
There are three Starmer biographies to date, each with a very different perspective. One is a critique from the left, one from the right and one, with his input, very positive. Yet all three books tell roughly the same story. Starmer started off on the radical left, as a talented young barrister, but tacked towards the centre as his career progressed and his political ambitions grew, becoming DPP – helping run what a former colleague described to me as “the really nasty parts of the state” – before entering politics.
As an MP, he ran for Labour leader on a leftwing platform and then moved sharply rightwards; depending on your political preference, either a smart strategic move, or what Simon Fletcher, who was a senior adviser to Starmer in his first year as leader of the opposition, told me he now views as a “massive, massive con”. He eschews ideology – “there’s no such thing as Starmerism and there never will be. I will make decisions one after the other,” Starmer reportedly told colleagues while leader of the opposition – and his detail-focused lawyer’s mind leads him to make effective, short-term tactical choices, but also blinds him to the wider consequences of his actions.
“He can be very tunnel-visioned,” concedes the senior barrister who praised his skills in a crisis, adding that on occasion it leads Starmer the politician to make statements that any lawyer would find “frankly, weird”. (Starmer’s assertion during an interview in October 2023 that Israel “has the right” to cut off water and electricity to Gaza – acts that are clearly war crimes – and his subsequent backtracking is the notorious example.) This pattern has continued into government. “He keeps blindsiding people,” says the head of one UK charity, pointing to the sudden decision in February to cut international aid. (“That really was a case of, ‘Oh shit, we need to find £2bn for defence,’” one government official told me.)
This isn’t just about Starmer, though. Human rights represent an idea with revolutionary implications: that we all have the right to freedom and dignity, wherever we live, and that it is everyone’s business to make sure of it. This goal is yet to be fully realised and the project to achieve it is riven with contradictions – the same contradictions, in fact, that we find in the two faces of Starmer. “Is he the man to save the system?” asks another former colleague. “That depends on what you think the system is.”
In 2020, Starmer told Desert Island Discs what had attracted him to human rights as a law student in the 1980s. “I became absolutely fascinated with the idea that at the end of the second world war, and the atrocities of the second world war, the countries around the world came together and made commitments to each other to honour human rights,” he said. “It’s not so much the individual rights, but it’s the human dignity that sits behind [them].”
Now, is that a radical sentiment, or a conservative one? In a way, it’s both. A tension within the human rights project is that it cuts across traditional political distinctions of left and right. The founding principles, outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, stress both individual freedom and socioeconomic equality. What’s more, human rights have an ambiguous relationship to the state. On the one hand, the claim that rights exist due to our common humanity, no matter who’s in charge, implies a challenge to established power. On the other, it reinforces existing power structures – since the human rights system only works if national governments agree to respect the rules. And to make those rules work in practice, you need laws, courts and an elite group of technicians who know how to work the levers: in other words, lawyers.
Traditionally, the British left was sceptical of the postwar human rights project, seeing it as a distraction from class struggle – and a tool the right could use to prevent any socialist government from redistributing wealth, on the grounds of individual liberty. When Starmer was starting out as a lawyer, co-founding the progressive Doughty Street barristers’ chambers in 1990, he expressed a similar scepticism. In a 1991 article for the radical Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers – of which he was a prominent member – Starmer warned that relying on legal institutions to bring about social change was “putting the cart before the horse”.
The collapse of communism abroad and Thatcher’s victory over organised labour at home prompted a change in attitudes. After the 1992 election, the Labour party committed to introducing a bill that would incorporate human rights protections into UK law. Writing in 1995, Starmer welcomed the prospect. “Our task, as socialist lawyers,” he argued, was to begin drafting a document that would bring about “an equal … distribution not only of political power, but also of economic power.” The following year, Starmer co-authored an audit of the UK’s compliance with international human rights standards, an influential book in Labour circles as Blair’s team drew up their plans for government.
By the time of the 1997 election, Starmer was a rising legal star. His rightwing biographer Michael Ashcroft places him at the centre of the elite professional milieu that rose along with New Labour. Many progressive lawyers welcomed the arrival of the Human Rights Act, passed in 1998, amid the modernising first flush of Blairism. Phillippa Kaufmann, a leading human rights barrister and an ex-partner of Starmer’s, told Starmer’s favoured biographer, Tom Baldwin, that it felt as if they were “driving forward the vehicle of change”. Starmer, who in 2002 was made queen’s counsel, or QC – the highest rank of barrister, now KC – added the act to his already formidable arsenal of expertise. In 2003, he represented a group of asylum-seekers who successfully challenged the government’s attempt to deny them housing and benefit payments; a few years later, he helped overturn control orders (restrictions on the movement and liberty of terrorism suspects, introduced by Blair) that had been placed on two men. Both sets of cases were won on human rights grounds.
It’s not possible to read a barrister’s list of cases as an index of their political opinions, since barristers – whose job is to argue in court on behalf of their clients – operate by the “cab rank” rule, where they must offer their services on a first come, first served basis. But by the areas of law in which they choose to specialise, it is possible to see where their interests lie. Starmer’s interest clearly lay in protecting individuals from being harmed by the state and other powerful institutions. (One of his longest-running cases, for which he provided free legal advice, was that of the McLibel duo, environmentalist campaigners sued by McDonald’s.) What that meant politically changed over time, however.
In the early 00s, Starmer chose to advise the Northern Ireland Policing Board on how to make the Police Service of Northern Ireland, established after the Good Friday agreement, compliant with human rights standards. That work seemed to represent a shift in his view of the state. Rather than seeing it as an adversary that serves mainly to protect wealth and privilege, as a radical leftist might put it, according to Baldwin he was coming to believe that a human rights lawyer could work most effectively on the inside. By making the state’s coercive functions compliant with human rights standards, they could be exercised more efficiently, and thus fairly.
As DPP from 2008 to 2013, Starmer brought a fundamentally bureaucratic approach to the role, say his biographers. One of his proudest achievements, he has said, was overseeing his agency’s transition from paper to digital record-keeping. Even Starmer’s critics acknowledge that making top-down tweaks to the rules had some benefits. The criminal defence solicitor Matt Foot, for instance, told me that Starmer’s guidance to prosecutors advising a light touch on assisted dying cases averted a lot of unnecessary suffering. “I had several clients at police stations who weren’t charged as a result,” he said.
At other times, notably during the 2011 riots, Starmer was comfortable using the full force of the state – a fact that his leftwing biographer, Oliver Eagleton, takes him to task for. Whether Starmer was right or wrong to do so is another matter. But it’s consistent with a particular interpretation of what human rights are there for. “I don’t think there’s a hidden emancipatory human rights fanatic inside Keir Starmer,” Gearty told me. Starmer decided to work within the state “because he understood the importance of the rules”.
A second tension within the human rights system is that it requires the cooperation of national governments, yet asks them to sign up to agreements that restrain their power. In the UK, that tension expresses itself most strongly in the political battle over the European convention on human rights and, by extension, the Human Rights Act, which incorporates the ECHR into UK law. Together, they are intended to restrain the government and other public bodies from arbitrarily mistreating us.
A vocal section of the British right has long sought to weaken or remove these protections. But in the last few years it has become a totemic issue akin to Britain’s membership of the EU before Brexit: withdrawing from the ECHR would, they say, take back control from a set of rules – and the liberal elite that upholds them – that are undermining national sovereignty. In particular, the right’s opprobrium is directed at article 8, the right to a private and family life, which it claims forces the British state to let unwanted migrants live in the UK.
Given Starmer’s background, you would expect his government to be solidly opposed to this assault on human rights – and in a way, it has been. Among the first things Starmer did as prime minister was to state publicly that his government would never withdraw from the ECHR, one of several gestures intended to signal the incoming government’s commitment to international treaties and the rule of law.
Human rights NGOs agree that the shift in approach has changed things, up to a point. “There’s a marked difference in the way I engage with this government compared with the last one,” says Yasmine Ahmed of Human Rights Watch, who regularly meets with ministers and officials to discuss international and domestic policy. “They’re willing to sit down and have thoughtful conversations about human rights issues.” The trouble, says Ahmed, is that this generally only extends to subjects the government sees as politically safe, such as the humanitarian crisis prompted by the war in Sudan. When her organisation raises more politically risky topics, such as migration or the Gaza war, then the government’s response, especially at higher levels, is much more limited.
In March, under pressure from the right, Starmer’s government announced a review of how article 8 is used in immigration cases. Several human rights experts told me they believed this lent weight to a damaging myth that would, in the words of one campaigner at a human rights NGO, “pour fuel on the fire”. Jamie Burton, a senior barrister and a former colleague of Starmer’s at Doughty Street, told me that ceding ground on article 8 – which also protects British citizens, for example, from unwanted media intrusion – would be a “lose-lose scenario”. In a recent article, Burton argued that the use of article 8 has already been so heavily restricted in immigration cases that any further tweaks would be useless and only encourage demands for the UK to drop it entirely. Dominic Grieve, a former Conservative attorney general, told me that in his view, attention would be better focused on delays in the courts system rather than article 8 itself. The delays, he said, were “not helpful to maintaining public confidence in the ECHR”.
Grieve, who as attorney general oversaw Starmer as DPP, told me he was confident in the prime minister’s commitment to human rights. For many lawyers, however – regardless of their personal views on policy – it is Starmer’s own rhetoric that has been most upsetting. Notably, at a session of prime minister’s questions in February 2025, Starmer said that a court had made the “wrong decision” to allow a family of six trying to flee Gaza to join their brother in the UK, based on a “legal loophole”. Whether the decision was based on any kind of loophole is questionable: a judge found that while they had applied under the Ukraine resettlement scheme, for which they were ineligible, they nonetheless had the right to reunite with their brother under article 8. But many lawyers were appalled that Starmer, of all people, would criticise the decision of an independent court. “For him to criticise a judge as prime minister with his background was extraordinary,” another KC who worked with Starmer in the 00s told me. (At the time, in response to the criticism – including from Lady Carr, the most senior judge in England and Wales – a spokesperson for Starmer said he had full respect for the independence of the judiciary.)
Starmer’s rhetoric can be explained as the government’s response to the rise of Reform UK.
“They’re expecting a further Tory wipeout, so the next election will be Starmer v Farage,” one person familiar with cabinet-level discussions told me. “That’s the explicit strategy. But what’s not explicit is what that means for the postwar settlement and human rights, all these knock-on effects.” The source continued: “If you’re more on the left of that debate, if you’re David Lammy or Angela Rayner or Lisa Nandy, you don’t want to stick your hand up in cabinet and say, have we thought about where this is heading – because you’ll get a combination of Morgan McSweeney, John Healey and Pat McFadden [respectively, Starmer’s chief of staff and two cabinet ministers] saying, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’” Both the source and another person familiar with cabinet-level discussions said that ministers whose views differ also fear being anonymously briefed against in the media.
The real problem, both added, is that you never know where Starmer himself sits. As if to illustrate the point, in May the current attorney general, Richard Hermer – appointed by Starmer last July – gave a major speech on the government’s commitment to the rule of law. For the most part, it was a strongly worded critique of the “pseudo-realists” in Westminster who argue that the old global order is dead and that Britain should withdraw from the ECHR and other treaties it finds inconvenient. It was a notable intervention, since Hermer, another former human rights barrister, has become a lightning rod for the right’s critique of the Starmer government.
In an echo of the attacks once deployed against Starmer when he was leader of the opposition, Hermer’s critics have been dredging up his old cases to cast aspersions on his politics. (The most lurid stunt so far involves a video in which the Conservative shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, parades in front of easels showing pictures of Hermer’s former clients, including Shamima Begum and Gerry Adams.) Hermer has been briefed against from within Labour, too, by officials who believe his professional background and insistence that ministers follow legal advice closely are damaging the party’s image. But Starmer has, for now, kept his attorney general in post. “Starmer has put Hermer there to keep himself honest,” suggested one Labour strategist I spoke to.
In that context, it was tempting to see Hermer’s speech as a sign of Starmer’s own worldview. Within hours, however, Hermer found himself at the centre of yet more criticism, for suggesting the “pseudo-realists” were borrowing their ideas from the 20th-century German jurist Carl Schmitt. In scholarly circles, Schmitt’s conservative ideas are widely discussed – but he’s better known for being the Nazis’ favourite legal theorist. A day later, Downing Street ordered Hermer to apologise.
For some people I spoke to, this showed one of Starmer’s wider weaknesses: he is committed to following the letter of the law, but unwilling to take the risk of arguing for the underlying principles. “Over the last 10 to 15 years, human rights have almost become dirty words,” said Karla McLaren, political relations manager for Amnesty International’s UK branch. “We were hoping the new government would come in and try to change that. But that’s not what we’ve seen. If you look at what cabinet ministers say, even when they’re talking about human rights issues, they very rarely use human rights language.”
One person familiar with cabinet-level conversations made a similar point, in reference to the ECHR. “We’ve allowed the right to define the issue. It does seem baffling to me that we keep attacking a bunch of laws that are very much in our interest, and probably more in our interest than for some other countries.”
A third tension in the human rights system is that it requires powerful states to enforce it, yet is undermined by an unequal global distribution of power. If states can pick and choose who is held accountable for human rights abuses, then it makes a mockery of the claim these rights are universal – and gives other states less of an incentive to participate. Nowhere has this become more apparent than in the west’s response to the war in Gaza, an issue that, as one official put it to me, “people have lots of very strong views about”.
To date, in its response to the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, Israel has killed at least 59,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch – NGOs whose reports are regularly cited by lawyers in Starmer’s former specialism – are among those who say Israel is committing genocide. (Both also say that Hamas committed war crimes on 7 October, including hostage-taking and the murder of civilians.) Yet Israel has been able to pursue its military action relatively unhindered thanks to support from its allies: the UK, certainly, but most of all the US, its principal military, financial and political backer.
As the dominant global power since 1945, the US played a significant role in shaping the human rights system (Eleanor Roosevelt, the former first lady, was a driving force behind the Universal Declaration) but its commitment to that system has been patchy. “You didn’t have to be super radical to think that the international legal order was designed for the west,” Gearty told me, but in years gone by “you could slightly pretend it wasn’t”. The west’s support of Israel’s war, he believes, has made the imbalance impossible to ignore.
Since taking office, Labour has tried to tread a fine line on Israel, between being seen to abide by international law, and continuing to support an ally it says has the right to defend itself from Hamas and hostile states such as Iran. At the same time, it has been keen not to upset the US, particularly since Trump took office. According to the two people familiar with cabinet-level discussions, there are disagreements in government about how best to approach this, analogous to the divisions over how to deal with Reform UK – a “dog-eat-dog” worldview, as one put it, versus a more humanitarian-minded one. Both positions are generally supportive of Israel, said the other source, but differ on people’s “relative strength of support for Netanyahu”.
As ever, it’s not clear exactly where the prime minister sits. But as Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire report in their recent book on Labour’s return to power, Starmer has exerted tight control over Labour’s position on Israel since 7 October, in contrast to issues where he has been happy to delegate. His behaviour, they write, has been driven by several motivations: horror at the Hamas attacks; a desire, at least in the early days, to show that Labour had moved on from the Corbyn years by signalling strong support for Israel; and a belief that any significant departure from the US position would be futile.
In opposition, this involved saying as little as possible except that Israel had a right to defend itself and that international law should be respected. In government, Labour has criticised aspects of Israel’s military campaign and has affirmed the UK’s support for the international criminal court’s jurisdiction. (It has said that the UK would fulfil its “legal obligations” if the Israeli prime minister, for whom the ICC has issued an arrest warrant, visits the UK – implying, but not directly confirming, that it would carry out an arrest.) On the occasions it has broken with US policy – for instance, when the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway recently placed individual sanctions on two far-right Israeli ministers – it has tried to do so only in concert with other states.
This is accompanied by a studied (some might say lawyerly) refusal to say in public whether or not the Israeli government as a whole is breaking international law. Doing so would have big implications, since Britain may then be obliged to follow its own human rights laws and impose wider-reaching sanctions, potentially suspending its substantial trade, military cooperation and intelligence-sharing agreements with Israel. Officials may have to reveal what they knew when; among other things, it is a criminal offence for public servants to knowingly assist in war crimes overseas.
It has led to some erratic gestures. Most prominently, in March, Downing Street forced the foreign secretary, David Lammy, to walk back comments that by blocking aid from reaching Gaza – an act now causing mass starvation – Israel had definitely broken international law. (The official line was that Israel was only “at risk” of doing so.) In public, ministers have said, once again, that it is for the courts to determine whether Israel is committing genocide. But Starmer has also invoked his own legal credentials to deflect criticism. “I’m well aware of the definition of genocide,” he snapped in a testy exchange at prime minister’s questions last November, “and that is why I’ve never described this as […] genocide”. (The international court of justice, which is considering an accusation of genocide made against Israel by South Africa, is not expected to deliver a ruling until 2027.)
The most delicate footwork, however, relates to weapons sales. On taking office last year, Labour announced a review of UK arms exports to Israel. Britain is one of the world’s largest arms producers, with export orders worth about £10bn a year, and in theory a system exists to stop them being used for human rights abuses. Manufacturers can only export weapons if the government gives them a licence to do so – although, according to a recent whistleblower, the system is too easy to manipulate.
At the end of August 2024, according to documents recently disclosed to the high court, Starmer personally phoned Netanyahu to warn him that the UK would be suspending 30 of 350 arms export licences. Civil servants had assessed there was a risk Israel would use these weapons to violate international law, but there was an exception. Essential parts produced by British companies for F-35 planes – the world’s deadliest fighter jets, designed and made mostly in the US – would continue to be shared among the UK’s allies, including Israel, since they were necessary for “global peace and security”.
This summer, a long-running legal challenge to that decision came to a head in the high court. Lawyers for the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq argued it contravened the genocide convention, the Geneva conventions, the UN arms trade treaty and the UK’s own export licensing rules. In its defence, part of the evidence for which was presented in secret, the government argued that continuing to supply the parts – which contribute to a joint programme between the UK, the US and several other Nato members, as well as favoured partners such as Israel and Saudi Arabia – was necessary to maintain a deterrent against Russia. Moreover, said the government, it was impossible for the UK to determine where the parts are distributed, since the US arms company Lockheed Martin controls many of the warehouses in which they are stored. As with so many other things, it was ultimately the US calling the shots – or, as the government’s lawyers put it in more opaque language, “the US is primarily responsible for contracting with contractors”.
On 30 June, the high court ruled in the government’s favour, saying that decisions about security were a matter for the executive, not the courts. For some people I spoke to, this is just the unpleasant reality of politics. “National security interests sometimes mean that you have to do things or tolerate things that you might not otherwise be very happy about,” Grieve told me. Others are less forgiving. Yasmine Ahmed of Human Rights Watch, which intervened in the case in support of Al-Haq, told me that the government’s position that it can opt out of the rules risks undermining the effectiveness of key human rights treaties.
Even more alarming, Ahmed said, was the government’s reasoning over why it was not bound to act by the genocide convention, which says states have a duty to prevent genocide if there is a serious risk of it occurring. Government lawyers argued that a state could only be said to have breached that duty if it could be definitively proven that an act of genocide had taken place – “a very difficult exercise, which could take many years”, said the government – in other words, only after the event, when it would be too late to stop it. “That’s just a shocking position to take,” Ahmed told me. “It’s morally repugnant but also legally and factually wrong.”
Even supportive observers are critical of the decision to keep supplying F-35 parts, seeing it as emblematic of a wider lack of action to defend human rights in Gaza. “What happened on 7 October [2023] was a terrible crime, but there is no justification for what is going on today in Gaza, none whatsoever,” Philippe Sands told me. “The fact that it wasn’t stopped long ago and that the British government has not gone further makes me extremely unhappy. Even if Britain is a friend of Israel, the role of friends is to speak truth to power.”
Sands’s fellow human rights expert Conor Gearty sympathises with the pressures Labour are under, but is critical nonetheless. “Starmer, Hermer, Lammy – they’re all lawyers. [Lammy is also a qualified barrister and practised law before entering politics.] They’re committed to law, but they can’t bear the full consequences of committing to law.” A former senior diplomat who worked in Washington DC during the past decade told me that while the pressure from Trump was real, blaming the US was also an excuse British politicians often used when they wanted to avoid owning their decisions. “It’s quite convenient, saying, ‘Oh don’t do that, the Americans won’t like it,’” said the former diplomat.
This approach has also upset many civil servants representing the UK overseas. Earlier this year, more than 300 Foreign Office staff sent an open letter to Lammy raising fears they had become complicit in war crimes committed by Israel; in response, the department’s chief civil servant told them to consider resigning. “It’s quite humiliating for a lot of people,” says a former civil servant who recently worked at the Foreign Office. “People working on Russia and Ukraine are saying, how can we be demanding accountability for human rights abuses here when we’re ignoring them in Gaza? We look like hypocrites.”
The former civil servant said that when Labour took power, they were “hopeful that Labour would realise the value of the rule of law and work to uphold it. This didn’t last. If anything, Lammy’s response to the letter was more ‘corporate computer says no’ than David Cameron [his Conservative predecessor as foreign secretary]. Cameron would at least read the letter and think about a response rather than ‘HR’ it.”
We’ve been here before. New Labour took office in 1997 promising great things on human rights – incorporating the ECHR into law at home and promising an “ethical foreign policy” abroad. It did the legal, procedural part, introducing the Human Rights Act and lending British support to global initiatives such as the international criminal court. But it backed away from the wider project. As the Human Rights Act came into force, it was attacked by the rightwing press. Under pressure – as the human rights expert Francesca Klug writes in her 2015 book on the subject – the Blair government abandoned a public awareness campaign extolling the benefits of the act. It also dropped plans to extend its reach to the economic sphere, which would have made issues such as a decent standard of living a matter of human rights, too, as the Universal Declaration originally envisioned. Meanwhile, Blair’s enthusiastic participation in the “war on terror” helped undermine the UN and led him to restrict civil liberties at home.
Carne Ross, a senior diplomat under the Blair government who resigned in protest at the Iraq war, told me that the travails of the Starmer government remind him of this period. “There’s a sense that human rights is a luxury parties give themselves in opposition, but in government national security takes over,” said Ross. “It’s a false choice, though, because prioritising human rights is a greater contribution to long-term stability and ultimately security.”
Human rights advocates have plenty of specific policy demands. But is there more the UK could do to defend the system as a whole? For Gearty, Labour’s contortions reflect “the weakness that is at the core of Britain’s standing in the world, which voters can never be told about, because British voters continue to believe that this country is a world power”. The trouble, according to Gearty, is that these contortions only make the problem worse. “Britain has little credibility for three reasons,” he said. “One, it is seen as the child of America, with no independent engagement. Two, Britain is an imperial nation that has not yet addressed what imperialism meant; it still largely believes that it granted independence to grateful global south entities. And three, having left Europe, it has no strategic vision of anything.”
Sands is slightly more optimistic. “We live in a world of double standards. So what’s new? My entire life with international law, we’ve lived with these kinds of situations,” he says. Sands believes the threat to the postwar human rights system is real, because the world’s three greatest powers – the US, Russia and China – are now all actively hostile to the project. “But in that context,” he says, “the Starmer government is going against the grain. I think it’s courageous.” In particular, Sands adds, countries in the global south that do not want to be bullied by their larger neighbours are still strongly invested in the human rights system – and the UK has the power to support their struggle.
For the barrister Jamie Burton, the dual meaning of equality – economic as well as political – is key. “It’s a real mistake to think about human rights as just being about technical rules, the courts and litigation,” he says. “They’re a description of what society is supposed to look like.” For Burton, a renewed focus on economic equality would help take the sting out of the right’s claims that human rights are for “other” people only and disadvantage ordinary British citizens. At one point, at least, Starmer was known to be sympathetic to this argument. In opposition, according to Pogrund and Maguire, he would frequently brandish a copy of the Marmot review, a landmark decade-long study on health and inequality in Britain, as an example of where Labour’s attention should lie. Now? It’s less clear.
When writing this piece, one story I heard kept coming back to mind. Earlier this year, a delegation of British Palestinians met with Starmer to ask for more aid to reach Gaza and for refugees to be allowed to join their relatives in the UK. As one of the Palestinians there described it to me, Starmer listened patiently and sensitively to their concerns, but did not propose anything new. Towards the end of the meeting, a teenage member of the group spoke up. “She said, ‘My ambition in life is to be a human rights lawyer like you. And I was very disappointed to hear what you just said. We were expecting more.’”
The Palestinian campaigner continued: “I thought, that’s very brave of her,” he told me, adding that he was worried, at first, that she had offended their host. But he was surprised by the prime minister’s reaction – or lack of it. “He looked a bit shocked, but he didn’t say anything.”