UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the Labour Party Conference, October 1, 2025 (Danny Lawson/PA)
Meeting the Challenge: UK Muslims and Moral Pragmatism
In early 2025, the UK authorized the continued export of components for F-35 fighter jets components to Israel, even as the International Court of Justice ordered the Netanyahu Government to take all measures to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza.
Ministers insisted the trade was lawful, despite warnings from UN experts and human rights groups that such exports risked making the UK complicit in grave breaches of humanitarian law. It was a small administrative decision with vast symbolic weight: the same country that helped craft the Geneva Conventions now finds ways to skirt their intent.
That moment captures a deeper global unravelling. From the attacks on the International Criminal Court by powerful governments to the open defiance of ICJ rulings, the post-war architecture built to prevent atrocities is being dismantled in plain sight. And Britain, long its defender, is now participating in its erosion.
The March of the Authoritarians
Across the globe, authoritarian politics are no longer the exception but the model. Russia’s Vladimir Putin wages a war of conquest in Ukraine while crushing dissent at home. Viktor Orbán has spent more than a decade in Hungary dismantling checks and balances, proudly declaring the rise of “illiberal democracy”.
In the US, Donald Trump has torm up treaties, ridiculed international institutions, and praised torture. This year, his administration imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court. Trump has deployed the military into American cities, seeking to normalize the sight of troops patrolling domestic streets. For citizens accustomed to such images abroad, the message was chilling: law is pliable, rights are conditional, and force comes first.
Israel has acted in the same vein, treating rulings from the ICJ and ICC as irrelevant while prosecuting a campaign in Gaza that jurists and UN experts describe as a genocide. What makes this moment extraordinary is not only the scale of the killing — almost 70,000 killed, entire neighbourhoods flattened, hospitals and schools deliberately targeted — but the response of the international community. Despite ICJ rulings, despite clear obligations under the Genocide Convention, states have continued to arm and enable Israel’s assault. Gaza has become the precedent: a demonstration that the rules can be broken without consequence.
Europe is not immune. The far right has long understood that the European project, especially the European Convention on Human Rights, stands in the way of their ambitions. From Brexit in the UK to Orbán in Hungary, from Marine Le Pen in France to the radical right in the Netherlands and Italy, the strategy is clear: weaken the institutions created to keep power in check, and remove the protections that prevent governments from criminalizing dissent,
scapegoating minorities, and ruling without oversight. The ECHR in particular must be taken down: it is a legal backstop that makes certain rights untouchable, even when governments wish otherwise.
The British Turn
In this climate, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, told the BBC he wants to “look again” at how international law when deportations are blocked. He singled out Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits torture and degrading treatment, and Article 8, which protects family life. He cited the case of a Brazilian paedophile who avoided deportation on the grounds that prison conditions in Brazil were worse.
Starmer stressed he does not want to “tear down” human rights law, but he insisted that “mass migration” means Britain must reconsider how it interprets protections. He even claimed the Refugee Convention, the Convention Against Torture, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child are barriers to effective deportation policy.
Shami Chakrabarti, one of the country’s leading human rights lawyers, rebutted the Prime Minister: such cases are “very, very rare” and courts do not simply block deportations because life is harder abroad. Starmer’s example was misleading.
The episode was telling. Britain was a principal architect of the post-war legal order. But with a barrister turned Prime Minister framing international conventions as obstacles, the UK joins the list of democracies treating human rights as negotiable and expendable.
The Cost: From Protection to Authoritarianism
And so Britain’s credibility abroad collapses. How can London condemn Russia’s gulags or China’s concentration camps in Xinjiang if it questions Article 3’s absolute prohibition on torture at home?
The power of international law has always rested on legitimacy. When leading democracies disregard their obligations, authoritarian regimes gain cover to do the same. Every exception in London or Washington becomes a precedent for Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, and Tehran.
The precedent is equally dangerous at home. If one article can be softened, what stops the erosion of others? Today it may be Article 3 or 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Tomorrow it could be the right to life under Article 2, or freedom of expression under Article 10. If the principle of non-refoulement — preventing the return of individuals to a country where they face a serious risk of persecution, torture, or other inhumane treatment — can be sidestepped, the entire refugee protection regime begins to unravel. The “reinterpretation” of rights is the first step to their dismantlement.
Those most affected are the most vulnerable: asylum seekers escaping persecution, dissidents forced into exile, torture survivors seeking sanctuary, children fleeing conflict and separation. For them, international protections are not abstractions but lifelines, the thin legal shield that stands between them and return to imprisonment, abuse, or death. Once that shield is made conditional, its protection vanishes at the moment when it is most needed.
That is precisely why the post-war order was built on absolute prohibitions in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The authors of the Refugee Convention, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the Genocide Convention had witnessed how states used emergencies, “different conditions”, and temporary exceptions to dismantle rights. They sought to close that door forever: no caveats and no opt-outs.
But the UK Government has announced sweeping new powers for police to restrict or relocate protests based on their “cumulative impact”, This effectively curbs repeated demonstrations on the pretext of protecting community cohesion and public safety.
Rather than interpreting law in the courts, London is restricting freedom in the streets. The lesson? A state that weakens international norms abroad will not hesitate to erode democratic rights at home. What begins as the suppression of dissent in the name of security or community cohesion will end as the normalization of authoritarianism.
History’s Warning
Democracies can quickly hollow themselves out. In 1933 Austria’s Parliament dissolved itself. Weimar Germany slid into dictatorship through emergency measures that were meant to be temporary.
That is the danger now. From Gaza to Washington, Moscow to Westminster, international law is being stripped of authority. What were once universal protections are being reframed as negotiable obstacles. If Prime Ministers or Presidents treats these conventions as barriers to be removed, dictators will dismiss them as irrelevant.
The philosopher George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We are forgetting that our post-war legal order was established so states could not excuse abuse by invoking special circumstances. To weaken those protections is to reopen the very path that led to humanity’s darkest chapters.
We are slipping backwards, and history tells us how quickly the fall can come.
