Labour must drop challenge over Netanyahu arrest warrant, says human rights chief

The new UK government must withdraw Rishi Sunak’s legal challenge to the international criminal court’s jurisdiction over alleged war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza, the UK director of Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said.

Yasmine Ahmed said that it is “absolutely critical” that the UK does not continue to challenge the right of the ICC to seek arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minster, Benjamin Netanyahu, and defence minister, Yoav Gallant, who the court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan , believes could bear responsibility for crimes against humanity.

In May, Sunak criticised the ICC for seeking arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant alongside Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and other Hamas operatives, stating there was no moral equivalence between the opposing sides.

Two weeks ago, the Guardian reported that the Labour government was expected to drop the legal challenge against the ICC, but this was later disputed by British diplomats who said the matter remained under review. The ICC has given the new Labour government until 26 July to decide whether to pursue the legal challenge.

“Will the UK government be principled and mature enough and adhere to its own statements of complying with and acting consistently with international law and supporting the rules-based order by withdrawing its application to intervene in the case of the ICC?” said Ahmed.

“It will be now for us to see where the rubber will hit the road.”

Ahmed said the new Labour government had come into power at a time of huge global crisis and uncertainty, with conflicts raging in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine.

After what she described as years of hostile policies by a Conservative administration that sought to undermine international human rights laws and institutions, she said the government must now actively pursue what the new foreign secretary David Lammy has called Labour’s “progressive realism” approach to human rights.

Ahmed said: “It is an incredibly complex world that they are addressing. We’re seeing a number of crises on a level I don’t know we’ve seen in decades.”

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Ahmed said she welcomed the government’s decisions to resume funding to the UN Palestine relief agency Unrwa , and to scrap the controversial Rwandan deportation scheme . She also said there was a need to prioritise ending arms licences with Israel and called for urgent action to be taken to respond to the humanitarian crisis in Sudan.

Domestically, she said there needed to be a legislative commitment to the protection of refugees and asylum seekers, and practical measures such as reinserting the duty to comply with international law in the ministerial code.

“We cannot promote and be seen to be, or in fact be, promoting a rules-based order in international law if we’re not also replicating that domestically,” said Ahmed. “We need to give [the government] an opportunity to live up to their rhetoric.”