A GROUP of MPs has asked for any legal advice Keir Starmer has received on the definition of genocide to be published.
As the Prime Minister continues to face criticism for denying genocide is being committed by Israel in Gaza, the Independent Alliance of MPs – which was formed in September – has written to Starmer saying the Government is “egregiously downplaying” the suffering of Palestinians and showing “contempt for international law”.
The group – which includes former Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn and those elected on a pro-Palestine platform – have also written to the Attorney General asking if he will publish any legal advice he has offered the Prime Minister on the definition of genocide.
Has the Prime Minister received any legal advice over the definition of genocide? A letter from the Independent Alliance, following Keir Starmer's refusal to recognise the genocide in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/vOTo5iTpxl
— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) November 18, 2024
The letter also asks the Attorney General if “the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary have publicly contradicted the findings of UN reports and pre-empted decisions of international courts on this issue”.
It comes after Starmer refused to acknowledge genocide was being carried out in Gaza in response to a question from Ayoub Khan during last week’s PMQs.
The letter asks what words he would “advise Palestinians to use to describe the mass slaughter of their people”.
Starmer’s denial came after Foreign Secretary David Lammy said in October that the term genocide referred to “when millions of people lost their lives in crises like Rwanda, the Second World War in the Holocaust” and that using it to describe Gaza “now undermines [its] seriousness”.
A UN special committee said in its annual report last week that policies and practices carried out by Israel in Gaza are “consistent with the characteristics of genocide”.
The letter from the Independent Alliance to Starmer says: “You will be aware of the International Court of Justice ruling in January, which determined that the right of Palestinians to be protected from genocide was at ‘real and imminent risk of irreparable prejudice’.
“Your flippant denial of genocide egregiously downplays the suffering of Palestinians and shows blatant disregard for international law.
“You will know that the legal definition of genocide is not dependent on the numbers killed, but on ‘the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group’ as laid out in Article II of the Genocide Convention.
“If the Government is relying on its own definition, we ask that you share this definition and explain why the horrors in Gaza do not qualify.”
Starmer has been widely criticised for his continuing denial of genocide in Gaza given that he was part of a group of international lawyers in 2014 who attempted to argue genocide had taken place in Vukovar, Croatia, in 1991.
An old clip of Starmer making his case in the International Court of Justice has been shared widely on the social media platform X.
In it, he details the “extensive” loss of life in Vukovar and how essential services such as water and electricity “all failed,” before branding it a “radically disproportionate attack, deliberately intended to devastate the town and its civilian population”.
Middle East expert Richard McNeil-Willson, who lectures in the Islamic and Middle Eastern studies department at Edinburgh University, said the clip shows the scale of the “cynical hypocrisy” the Labour Party are currently engaged in on Gaza.
“That Starmer is unwilling to extend even a fraction of this condemnation to the killing of (at conservative estimates) several tens of thousands of Palestinians, the flattening of over half of Gaza’s homes, the displacement of 1.7 million people, and the irrevocable destruction of the fabric of Palestinian cultural life through the deliberate destruction of schools, universities, churches, mosques, national archives and public buildings is representative of the moral descent of the Labour Party into genocide complicity,” he told The National.
NHS surgeon Nizam Mamode also told the Sunday National that if Starmer does not want to use the word genocide to describe the atrocities in Gaza, he should “consider handing back his law degree”.
“If a Labour Government is not prepared to stand up and say something about that, then I think they should be absolutely ashamed of themselves,” he said.
