The United Nations special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories has accused British Foreign Secretary David Lammy of being a “genocide denier” and said the UK has done “nothing” to prevent atrocities in Gaza.
In an interview with Middle East Eye in London on Wednesday, Francesca Albanese took aim at Lammy in response to comments he made in late October denying that Israel is committing genocide.
“I hadn’t realised that Mr Lammy was a lawyer,” she said, referring to Lammy’s legal background.
“As a politician, you might say that for political convenience,” she suggested, adding that would still make someone “a genocide denier”.
However, she saw such remarks from someone familiar with law surprising. “Because excuse me? What are you saying?”
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On 29 October, Lammy suggested that Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza because millions of people have not been killed.
Terms like genocide, Lammy told parliament, “were largely used when millions of people lost their lives in crises like Rwanda, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the way that they are used now undermines the seriousness of that term”.
Albandese told MEE: “He’s referring to cases where genocide has resulted in industrial scale of killing, of mass extermination, like in Rwanda and during the Holocaust.
“But it’s not the numbers of those killed that determines whether or not there is genocide, and any lawyer would know that.”
Albanese noted that “certain jurispudence might have inclined Mr Lammy to conclude what he said”.
“But by doing so, he’s denying that genocide occurred in the case of Australia or Canada or the United States, where the genocide was carried out primarily not through mass killing but through cutting the bloodline of the Aboriginals so that they could disappear in the white European coloniser’s society.”
Accusing UK of not preventing genocide
An International Court of Justice interim ruling in January said that it was plausible that Israel had breached the Genocide Convention. As an emergency measure, it ordered Israel ensure that its army refrained from genocidal acts against Palestinians. It may take several years before the ICJ makes a full judgement on the case brought by South Africa in December.
Several genocide experts and research groups, including the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, have also declared that Israeli actions in Gaza constitute genocide.
In March, Albanese submitted a report at the UN Human Rights Council entitled “Anatomy of a Genocide” which concluded: “Genocidal acts [in Gaza] were approved and given effect following statements of genocidal intent issued by senior military and government officials.” Another report in October added that genocidal acts in Gaza should be understood within the context of decades of settler colonialism, and that the state of Israel should be held accountable for orchestrating and failing to prevent such acts.
In the interview with MEE, the UN special rapporteur argued that the Labour government is not acting to prevent genocide.
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“The question to Mr Lammy is: what is the UK doing to prevent acts of genocide? The International Court of Justice has recognised the plausibility of genocide,” she said.
“And also, how does he qualify the total destruction of Gaza, from homes, mosques, churches, hospitals, bakeries?
“Why [were] 17,000 children killed under our watch? What has the UK done to stop it? Nothing. Nothing.”
This comes after independent MP Ayoub Khan asked Prime Minister Keir Starmer in parliament on Wednesday why the government has not classified Israel’s war on Gaza as genocide.
Starmer replied: “I’m well aware of the definition of genocide, and that is why I’ve never referred to it as genocide.”
On Wednesday evening, the four Green Party MPs wrote to Lammy asking for “clarification” on whether Britain has a “duty to take action to prevent genocide in Gaza”, as well as on whether the government “has assessed that there is a serious risk of genocide” there.
They further asked for clarification on “what threshold must be met that would trigger the United Kingdom’s obligation to prevent, and the corresponding duty to take action, as a state party to the Genocide Convention (1948) and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court”.
Declassified UK reported on Wednesday that Britain has continued exporting parts for Israeli air force planes, since suspending 30 out of 350 arms export licences to Israel in September.
