Plaid Cymru MPs back bid to press UK Government for response to ICJ Israel ruling
Plaid Cymru MPs have joined a cross-party initiative to put pressure on the UK Government to issue a response to last year’s groundbreaking International Court of Justice’s judgment on Israel’s activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT).
Ben Lake, Liz Saville Roberts, Llinos Medi and Ann Davies are part of a group of a group of 112 parliamentarians who have written to the Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Attorney General Lord Richard Hermer.
They are demanding that the UK government immediately publishes its response to the ICJ’s advisory opinion published In July 2024, that ruled Israel should pay reparations to the Palestinian people and that their policies violate the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
‘Obligations’
Plaid Cymru Foreign Affairs spokesperson, Ben Lake MP said: “The ICJ issued its findings a year ago (19 July 2024) but the UK Government is yet to publish its response. The UK Government is currently failing to hold the Israeli Government to account, and we urge the Prime Minister and his Government to address the unlawful situation occurring in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as well as its own obligations under international law.”
The UK Government has promised parliament to publish its formal response to the advisory opinion, however, the only comment it has made on ICJ’s advisory opinion so far, is that it doesn’t disagree with its central findings.
In a statement on 22 October 2024, it said: “The UK does not disagree with the central findings of the International Court of Justice’s Advisory Opinion on the ‘Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem”.
The Foreign Secretary, in his appearance in front of the International Development Select Committee on 16 July 2025, replying to a question asking why it had taken so long to publish the government’s response, said: “it’s an 83-page opinion. So, it’s right that the lawyers that you would expect within government assist and do the work that you would expect them to do.”
‘Utter nonsense’
Chris Doyle, Director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding (Caabu), which is behind the campaign, said: “It is an utter nonsense that a year on from this historic advisory opinion that the government has not issued its formal response. Sources have told Caabu that the legal response was drafted months ago. It is also not that complex a legal document based on many previous legal opinions.
“What it highlights is the government’s continued aversion to hold Israel to account, its failure to uphold international law and respect these international judicial institutions as it claims it does.”
16 civil society organisations, including Caabu, have also written to the government calling for it to take action to end UK complicity in violations of Palestinian rights, and to help bring the occupation to a rapid end.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive, which has destroyed large swathes of Gaza, has killed more than 53,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
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Brave initiative. Weak government though.
Agree. Not entirely the fault of the ‘weak government’, though. They must know well enough that these days the UK has no effective influence on Netanyahu’s cabal; only the USA has enough clout for that.
So any UK strictures would, in effect, be nothing more than a gesture which Israel would simply ignore.
It is a tiny country in size with very few small islands around the world to show any remaining remnants of its once great empire. But if it ever drew a red line which it would never cross, the world would listen and things would change. I do not underestimate the standing of the UK in this world. I do however think that with reform biting the heels of Labour, the government is indecisive and is unable to push for difficult decisions and stick to any of its principles. Except to proscribe any one calling out the genocide in Palestine.… Read more »
‘But if it ever drew a red line which it would never cross, the world would listen and things would change.’ I just don’t think that’s by any means generally true these days. There are a number of national governments which make a cool appraisal of how they perceive the UK’s actual significance and clout in the contemporary world and shape their reaction to any British initiative accordingly. And I think Netanyahu’s Israel is manifestly one of them. I don’t ‘underestimate the standing of the UK in this world’ either, but I do believe that the hard reality is that… Read more »
I admire the detailed way you have constructed your argument and reasoning and I agree, the UK is not as influential as it once was. I suppose I was hoping for something to happen quickly after nation.cymru reported, the calling out of the names of 20,000 children murdered in Ghazza, on the steps of the Senedd. It was a more powerful protest than whatever is happening around the UK today and no other UK based media reported it to my knowledge. It made the genocide more real, more human.
I think, as I said, that Israel is now unambiguously embarked on genocide in Gaza, and also that there’s an amateur attempt at ethnic cleansing in the West Bank which Netanyahu’s government deliberately overlooks and to some degree encourages.
And that the abiding horror which western European politicians continue to feel about Adolf Hitler’s attempt at eradicating Jews from the face of the earth – or, at any rate, from the face of Europe – still paralyzes them every time militant Zionist extremists start to impute ‘antisemitism’.
Wales has more than enough problems of it’s own. How about tackling these first!