Michael Mansfield, an eminent human rights lawyer, talks to media about a war crimes case he and others recently filed and why legal efforts still matter despite a breakdown of the rule of law.
London, United Kingdom – Ten British citizens, including dual nationals, who have served in the Israeli army are being accused of war crimes in Gaza.
They are suspected of acts such as “murder, extermination, attacking civilians, and deportation or forcible transfer of population”, according to the Palestine-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and the UK-based Public Interest Law Centre, which last week submitted a 240-page report to the Metropolitan Police’s War Crimes Unit.
Michael Mansfield, 83, a leading English barrister who has worked on several high-profile cases throughout his career and is dubbed “the king” of human rights work, was among those who handed over the dossier that took a team of lawyers and researchers in Britain and The Hague six months to compile.
Dozens of other barristers, lawyers, researchers and human rights practitioners have signed a letter of support, urging the Met’s war crimes team to investigate the complaints.
Due to legal reasons, neither the names of the suspects, some of whom worked at the officer level, nor the report in full are being made public. Alleged war crimes from October 7, 2023, to May 31 are documented in the file, which is based on open-source material and witness testimonies.
media interviewed Mansfield about the landmark case, his views on Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and why he believes legal efforts against those involved in the onslaught remain important, even as critical rulings are ignored by those in power and mass killings continue unabated.
media: What can you tell us about the case?
Michael Mansfield: The reason I can’t talk about the detail of it is perhaps obvious: … The people [accused] would immediately know who they were.
The United Kingdom can obviously investigate themselves, or the International Criminal Court can investigate and charge and so forth.
Nobody can be unaware of the extent of the devastation, particularly in Gaza, although that’s not the only place in the world where such things are happening. And in relation to those matters, the public are asking, “What are we doing about it? What can we do about it?”
The international institutions of justice and conventions on human rights were established just after the Second World War in order to prevent this happening, if at all possible, by intervening.
[But] the United Nations’s ability to intervene has been emasculated by the major nations – Russia and America nearly always opposing each other. On top of that, the United Kingdom sitting on the fence and abstaining on most of these issues.
Slowly but surely, all the principles to do with the rule of law and rules-based democracy have been, essentially, denuded from practicality.
The court finds it very difficult to do anything because the countries [allegedly behind war crimes] are seemingly immune. They don’t mind what the international courts may think – either the International Criminal Court [or the] International Court of Justice.
media: As most monitors and observers are unable to enter Gaza presently due to the Israeli siege, how did the researchers and lawyers behind the report identify those accused?
There’s something called the Berkeley Protocol, which is focused on how you would gather evidence from publicly available sources.
Publicly available sources could be media [footage]. It could be somebody doing a selfie on their own phone.
The research has already been done to ensure that the material on these 10 is sufficient for the police to take a decision whether they can do more or not.
media: This month, Hungary withdrew from the International Criminal Court, which has issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, ahead of a visit by the Israeli premier. If the global institutions that are meant to uphold human rights laws are under threat, decisions are sidestepped, and massacres continue in places like Gaza, what impact can legal efforts like yours have?
Mansfield: I think they do make a difference for those of us who care.
I mean, they don’t make a difference to the perpetrators. They never have. And that’s why they had the Nuremberg trials at the end of the Second World War.
As a lawyer, I can’t just sit back and say I’ve wasted 55 years of my career. I’ve got to be able to say I have strived hard to get a situation in which people are made accountable.
The law has been unable to deliver. The law is there, the institutions are there, but until governments … start paying respect to the rule of law and not ignoring it, there are lots of different ways in which people can be made accountable. As lawyers and as thinking members of the public, we have to be at the ready to get the authorities to actually do their job because if we don’t, no one else will, and it’ll just get worse.
The basic freedoms you and I enjoy when we can – freedom of association, movement, speech and so on – they’re not divisible. What I mean by that is you might live on the other side of the world, but if it’s your rights being attacked in this way, it’s me as well. Make no mistake, when it’s happening there, it could be you next.
That sort of approach to human rights is not a sort of woke topic that just a few liberal lawyers think of. It’s been fought hard for by other people. Lawyers in the past have fought very hard to set it all up.
media: Do you classify what’s happening in Gaza as a genocide?
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