Conor Gearty was a founder member of Matrix chambers and a professor of human rights law at LSE. His books include On Fantasy Island: Britain, Europe and Human Rights and Homeland Insecurity: The Rise and Rise of Global Anti-Terrorism Law. His first piece for the LRB, in 1994, was on political sleaze. He also wrote on the SAS killing of three IRA members in Gibraltar, the Scott Inquiry into the sale of British arms to Iraq, Michael Collins, the Hutton Inquiry into the death of David Kelly, human rights law and war crimes in Gaza. He died in September 2025 at the age of 67. A piece on the ways that the UK Supreme Court is ‘quietly editing the Human Rights Act out of existence’ will appear in a forthcoming issue of the paper.
It is extraordinary that the UK Supreme Court’s recent decision on the rights of trans people in For Women Scotland v. The Scottish Ministers completely ignores the impact of human rights law. The privacy rights of those who identify as having a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth have been jettisoned as a result of the court’s determination that the gender...
The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, visited Rwanda before Christmas and on a visit to one of its genocide memorial sites tweeted that she ‘honour[ed] the memory of the victims of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi’, adding that ‘the past shall never be forgotten.’ But the present, it seems, can be denied. How do we square all these efforts at denial with the celebration by many in Israel at the death and destruction being visited on the population of Gaza, the pressure for the same kind of action to be taken in the West Bank, and the proud circulation by Israeli troops of selfies and videos from the scene to show to their families and friends? Describing the Palestinians as vermin to be removed or killed is hardly the language of denial, but many Israelis combine celebration with a denial that what’s happening is their fault. Denial in Israel is a means of keeping supporters abroad on message. We in the Global North need lies so that we can continue to see our support for Israeli action as morally possible.
International law takes a special interest in war. Where there is an armed conflict or an occupation it is not enough to hope vaguely that human rights will be respected and for the UN or a special rapporteur to issue a cross report if they are not. War warrants a much fiercer international response, and in recognition of this, the International Criminal Court (ICC) was established in 2002,...
Robert Reed became president of the United Kingdom Supreme Court on 13 January 2020, succeeding Lady Hale. By the end of 2021, the Supreme Court had produced 111 judgments since his appointment, 53 in 2020 and 58 in 2021, with Lord Reed himself sitting in 56 of these cases. These decisions give us an opportunity to assess how his Supreme Court is performing in the current malign political...
This book’s most startling revelation – if true – concerns the state of legal education in Britain today. We are told that from their ‘first days at law school’ our...
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