Kmflett's Blog

Starmer from Iraq 2003 to Venezuela 2026: The UN and International Law fade away

In 2003 Keir Starmer was a human rights lawyer. He wrote in the Guardian on Blair’s decision to back war with Iraq without clear backing from the UN. He made clear that Sections 42 and 51 of the UN Charter were relevant.

He didn’t think it was clear that the requirements of either had been met and as a matter of record he opposed the war.

When it comes to Trump’s kidnap of the Venezuelan President and his wife, and the US incursion into that country its difficult to find a lawyer that doesn’t think a war crime has been committed.

Starmer has underlined that he is a ‘lifelong advocate of international law’ but so far has failed to indicate that Trump has broken it. LibDem leader Ed Davey has rightly suggested that no quarter should be given to either Putin or Trump in this respect, although Liberal internationalism comes and goes. It was a feature of some Liberal politics in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and certainly on the Iraq War.

Labour, the Blair period aside, has perhaps had a slightly better record. On Suez in 1956 the right-wing Labour leader Gaitskell used the slogan Law not War, something Starmer might think of mentioning to Trump.

Of course the whole status of the UN and international law has been downgraded by Israel in Gaza and there is a difference between being a human rights lawyer and leader of the Labour Party but the importance of the UN and international law remains at least as a principle. On this from Starmer so far, silence.

It may well be that international law is not of much use for those it was never really meant for in the first place, Palestinians and those living in what Trump sees as the US’s ‘backyard’. Resistance from below is the way forward here, something one senses Starmer will never be found to be backing at least in 2026.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/mar/17/foreignpolicy.iraq1