Autocrats and ‘strongmen’ want us to feel defeated on international law. But ‘the fact that certain laws are being violated does not, of course, mean those laws no longer exist’, writes Caroline de Gruyter.
Caroline de Gruyter
“No, we are not in a world without law, or in a post-rules world. We are, however, in a world in which some would like to strip back or do away with certain international rules, and that is the struggle which is underway.”
When an Israeli minister states that his country must occupy southern Lebanon, when the US president threatens Iran with the total destruction of its “civilisation” and the Russian president again orders thousands of drones and missiles to be fired at Ukrainian apartment blocks and civilian infrastructure — in such times, when displays of raw power seem to be triumphing once again over international law, it is definitely a good idea to read the FA Mann Lecture Philippe Sands, the Franco-British lawyer and professor of international public law, delivered in London last November. The quote above comes from that lecture, titled A World Without Law?
This question is on many people’s minds, certainly in Europe.
The European Union is based on the rule of law: it was founded on the principle of the separation of powers through common laws that apply to all member states, big and small.
Europe has benefited tremendously from the international rules-based system, which it helped to establish in part, and has a lot to lose if this would disappear and be replaced by the law of the jungle.
Sands worked on the legal case against the former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet and wrote wonderful books like The Ratline and East-West Street.
He says he understands people get depressed in today’s world.
John Bew, a historian at King’s College and a former adviser to British PM Boris Johnson, even wrote we should not cling “sentimentally” to international law — because it is gone, alas.
‘Strongmen’ want you to feel defeated
But such defeatism, Sands argues, is just what the strongmen want us to feel. They like to think they are above the laws, put into place after the Second World War with the aim of ensuring autocrats do not succeed again to abuse power and plunge the world into ruin.
Autocrats want us to feel defeated, they want us to give up without a fight. Sands makes an important point that Europeans really to bear in mind today: “The fact that certain laws are being violated does not, of course, mean those laws no longer exist.”
He is right.
International law still governs thousands of things people hardly pay attention to, like telecommunications, air traffic, relations between states or arbitration in commercial disputes.
What is under pressure right now is only a small part of that law — mainly international humanitarian law, such as laws on the use of violence in wartime.
And it is precisely because international law exists — and has not disappeared — that most European governments did not wish to become involved in the illegal attacks on Iran by Israel and the United States.
For the same reason, they condemn Donald Trump’s plan to snatch Greenland and Israel’s relentless bombardments on civilians in Lebanon.
One can even argue that European governments are now so alarmed by these violations that — however late in the day — they begin to take a stronger stand against them than before.
They are alarmed because they realise that if Europe does not defend international law, lawlessness may one day engulf the very continent priding itself on its values.
There may very well be legal proceedings at some point over the Iran war. just as there is currently a case against Israel over genocide in Gaza.
A tribunal has also just been established regarding Russian aggression against Ukraine, the first international tribunal on the crime of aggression since Nuremberg.
These new initiatives are another sign that international law is alive and kicking, rather than being ground to a halt.
Moreover, the violation of international law is nothing new: brute force has always existed, even when international law was still considered in good health — Hungary’s crushed uprising in 1956, the Vietnam War and the genocide in Rwanda are just a few examples of large-scale violations.
