UN Official Slams David Lammy’s Refusal to Call Gaza a Genocide

 UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese has lambasted foreign secretary David Lammy for saying it is premature to call Gaza a genocide, adding that politicians are “making up arguments to justify Israel’s conduct”.

Lammy, a former barrister, told the Commons in late October that legal terms such as genocide “must be determined by international courts”, referring to South Africa’s case against Israel at the international court of justice (ICJ). In an interview with Novara Media, Albanese, a human rights lawyer of over two decades’ experience, said Lammy was “wrong”.

“It’s not true that you need a judicial body to determine that a genocide is happening,” she said.

“When there is the possibility and plausibility that a genocide is being committed – hence the ongoing ICJ and ICC cases – then the obligations of the UN genocide convention are triggered.”

Albanese added that western powers showed no reluctance to use the term genocide in other contexts before a legal ruling, citing former US secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, who recently called the war in Sudan a genocide. “Is it only a genocide when it’s convenient for them?” she asked.

“This hypocrisy is so in our faces that people can no longer ignore it,” she added.

The foreign secretary has been approached for comment.

Though genocide experts had been describing it as such since the very earliest days of the war, Albanese was among the first diplomats to call Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide. In March last year, she said there were “reasonable grounds” to conclude that Israel was committing genocide. Her findings echoed that of the ICJ’s two months earlier, which stated that Israel’s actions “plausibly” breached the UN genocide convention.

Despite its normalisation among international lawyers and genocide experts, the term genocide has been stubbornly refused by politicians and media outlets around the world.

In October, prime minister Keir Starmer boasted, “I have never described what is going on in Gaza as genocide”, following former US president Joe Biden’s insistence in May that the war in Gaza “is not genocide”. The world’s two largest progressive media outlets, including the New York Times and Guardian, ban the term with varying degrees of explicitness, while former BBC employees have pointed out that presenters will always push back when guests float the term....<<<Read More>>>...