The international human rights system – the rules, principles and practices intended to ensure that states do not abuse people – is under greater threat now than at any other point since 1945. Fortunately, we in the UK couldn’t wish for a better-qualified prime minister to face this challenge. Keir Starmer is a distinguished former human rights lawyer and prosecutor, with a 30-year career behind him, who expresses a deep personal commitment to defending ordinary people against injustice. He knows human rights law inside out – in fact, he literally wrote the book on its European incarnation – and has acted as a lawyer at more or less every level of the system. (Starmer is the only British prime minister, and probably the only world leader, to have argued a case under the genocide convention – against Serbia on behalf of Croatia in 2014 – at the international court of justice.) He is also an experienced administrator, through his time as director of public prosecutions (DPP), which means he knows how to operate the machinery of state better than most politicians do.
Unfortunately, there’s someone standing in Starmer’s way: a powerful man who critics say is helping to weaken the international human rights system. He fawns over authoritarian demagogues abroad and is seeking to diminish the protections the UK offers to some vulnerable minorities. He conflates peaceful, if disruptive, protest with deadly terrorism and calls for musicians whose views and language he dislikes to be dropped from festival bills. At times, he uses his public platform to criticise courts, whose independence is vital to maintaining the human rights system. At others, he uses legal sophistry to avoid openly stating and defending his own political position, including on matters of life and death. He is, even some of his admirers admit, a ruthless careerist prepared to jettison his stated principles when politically expedient. That person is also called Keir Starmer.
Since the 2024 general election, much ink has been spilled on what Labour is getting wrong in government. But I’ve been puzzled by a slightly different question: why is Labour’s record to date on human rights – the one thing you might expect a Starmer-led government to be rock solid on – so mixed? Over the past six months, I have spoken to more than two dozen sources, including current and former Labour insiders, former legal colleagues of Starmer’s and leading human rights advocates, to try to understand how Starmer the lawyer might be shaping Starmer the prime minister.
Some human rights experts are delighted that, after the scorched-earth years of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, there has been a shift in tone and content. “It is a major achievement,” says Conor Gearty, a professor of human rights law at the London School of Economics and long-term acquaintance of Starmer, “to have stabilised Britain’s commitment to law at a time when the current is flowing the other way internationally.” For the author, barrister and academic Philippe Sands, a prominent critic of the 2003 Iraq war, the UK is belatedly restoring a reputation it shredded two decades ago. “When I’ve gone to meetings in the UN, when I’ve gone to meetings in the Council of Europe, I’ve seen that Britain is once more taken seriously in relation to building a more positive agenda on human rights.” Sands is particularly encouraged by Labour’s commitment to setting up a special tribunal for Russian war crimes in Ukraine, despite the US’s wavering support. Such achievements, Sands and Gearty believe, are in no small part down to Starmer himself. “He does well in a crisis,” says a senior barrister who worked on several cases with Starmer in the 2000s. “That’s what litigators do: they enter the fray at the moment of complete crisis and shitshow.”
Others, to put it mildly, aren’t so keen. Before the election, Starmer told a meeting of Iranian women activists that a Labour government would put human rights at the heart of everything it did. “That’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard,” says a campaigner at a UK charity who regularly meets with ministers and officials. The campaigner reeled off a list of complaints, from policies on migration, policing and protest, to disability benefit cuts and a failure to push harder for an end to Israel’s war in Gaza. Some former colleagues are shocked that Starmer presides over all this. “Given he made his career off a woman who constantly scaled the fences of US bases,” says the criminal defence solicitor Matt Foot, referring to Lindis Percy, a veteran peace activist Starmer represented several times in the 1990s and 00s, “what he’s doing on protest is particularly sickening.”
Staff at several human rights NGOs described encountering a brittle, defensive attitude from ministers in private meetings. “They think the human rights community should put up and shut up,” said one. “There’s a tone as if our agenda is against the interests of UK citizens,” said another, who focuses on international issues. “The line that comes back is that this is irrelevant to ordinary people’s concerns.” All said that this attitude emanated most strongly from officials working for the prime minister, an interpretation echoed by two people familiar with cabinet-level conversations. Several human rights advocates described being made to feel they should just be grateful it was Labour and not the Tories in charge.