Just as respect and support for law are an indispensable basis of the rule of law in the national arena, so progress in strengthening international law is going to depend on developing the same attitudes within the global polity. Needed here is a popular movement in support of international law: an assemblage of social and political forces that will press for changes in the law where they are needed, endeavour to keep governments and international organizations to their duty and task of upholding international law, of enforcing it, penalizing states that violate it, and so forth. That such a movement is in process of formation is widely perceived. Geoffrey Robertson has spoken of 'a movement which now has millions of members throughout the world... a vast audience beginning to think like global citizens'. Others have written of 'communities of conscience', and of 'a global human rights civil society'. They refer thereby to a transnational public that is alert to human rights issues: a loose coalition of individuals, civil society organizations and relief agencies, and of mass media, now including the internet, which draw attention to or campaign about atrocities and developing crises.
This picture certainly represents a welcome state of affairs when measured against the past. At the same time, within some sectors of opinion that regularly appeal to international law, a weakness is clearly visible. It consists of treating international law as a mere convenience, one by reference to which you condemn breaches of the law but only when it suits your political purpose to do so, and overlook other breaches even though these stand smack bang on the same terrain as the ones you're condemning.
Today, by chance, brings two examples of what I'm talking about. Forthrightly, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown declares Israel's blockade of Gaza to be 'against international law and human rights conventions'. Oxfam, Amnesty International and the EU, she says, 'have condemned this as collective punishment'. And she offers a word of reassurance in this regard:
I am not defending the militants who attack Israel; what they do is extreme provocation.
Ahhh... extreme provocation, but nothing about its being a form of collective punishment or, as an attack upon civilians (which she neglects to mention), in breach of international law. No, just a kind of irritant that somehow eludes classification in terms of legality or the lack of it.
Different commentator, same pattern. Andrea Becker, 'head of advocacy for Medical Aid for Palestinians', says:
There can be no dispute that measures of collective punishment against the civilian population of Gaza are illegal under international humanitarian law.
Clear as a bell. But when Becker gets to Israel's proffered justifications, and amongst these 'punishment for militant attacks on Israeli civilians', she temporarily loses her grip on the concept of international humanitarian law and how it might apply to 'militant' attacks on civilians.
What you have here, in other words, is not genuine respect for law but political cynicism: the appeal to law as a mere argument of convenience. Notice - to forestall avoidable misunderstanding - that respect for the rule of law does not entail never criticizing or challenging what you take to be bad law. But this isn't what our two spokespersons for international law above are up to when they step around breaches of international law for which, not Israel, but the Palestinians are responsible. Alibhai-Brown and Becker are simply encouraging you in an oversight that suits them.