Cuts to the UK’s foreign aid and diplomatic arms are hampering Britain's ability to prevent atrocities as global conflicts increase, experts have warned.
Yasmine Ahmed, senior director at Amnesty International, said the UK government was not acting fast enough to prevent war crimes, such as those allegedly committed in Sudan and Gaza. “Often atrocity prevention is not prioritised sufficiently in terms of a whole of government policy response,” Ms Ahmed told The National.
Last year, Britain’s overseas aid budget was slashed from 0.5 per cent of its gross national income to 0.3 per cent, at a time when conflicts are increasing worldwide. These cuts were issued by former prime minister Keir Starmer in January last year and Britain's spending on overseas aid is expected to fall by 42 per cent, or £6.5 billion ($8.6 billion), over four years, according to the Independent Commission for Aid Impact.
One of the first Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office units to feel the impact of the cuts was international humanitarian law cell monitoring war crimes in Gaza. The FCDO has insisted these aid cuts would not affect the department’s ability to conduct human rights assessments of a conflict – but Ms Ahmed was sceptical.
“If you’ve got a huge percentage – 20 per cent of the Foreign Office being cut – there’s no doubt this is going to have a significant impact across the board,” she said. “The question is how well will the Foreign Office continue to be equipped to conduct these assessments.”
In the past few weeks there has been an escalation of conflict between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis in Yemen, and the possibility of all-out war between Eritrea and Ethiopia has developed.
Yet the UK's ability to enforce the laws of war and human rights on the world stage was dwindling. “What we’re finding now is that the UK and certainly other European states and other western states don’t have as much leverage as they used to,” Ms Ahmed said.
This was leading to a visible decline in the protection of civilians in conflict. “They [the UK and European governments] are operating in an increasingly volatile political world and it’s increasingly transactional,” she said. “There is less space to be values driven.”
On Tuesday, a group of British human rights lawyers and experts in global conflict called on the UK to loosen jurisdiction rules, so British courts can prosecute on a wider range of war crimes as well going after as companies accused of involvement.
The group warned that the UK was currently “ill-equipped to identify and respond effectively to the warning signs of genocide and other atrocity crimes”, and that this had “serious implications” for “national security, stability and economic prosperity”.
The Atrocities Standing Group, which includes Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk and Baroness Helena Kennedy, published the results of its 18 months of inquiry and parliamentary hearings on Tuesday in a report.
It called for a tougher global policing role by using more “Magnitsky-style sanctions”, targeted punitive measures. Frozen sovereign assets from such sanctions could be repurposed to compensate victims of war crimes, by introducing relevant laws to do so, the report suggested.
The UK government is seeking to re-establish Britain’s role in the world as conflicts escalate globally. “As the international rules-based order is facing fragmentation and significant challenges, it is key that the UK uses its global position to lead and support efforts to secure justice and accountability for international crimes,” the report said.
Former British prime minister Gordon Brown, who has endorsed the report, said the UK needed to take serious foreign policy steps that go well beyond “condemnation” and “sympathy”.
“Sympathy is not prevention, condemnation is not policy,” he said ahead of the report's launch. “The question before the United Kingdom and other democratic states is simple and grave.
“Will we continue to respond to atrocity crimes only after they have shocked our conscience, or will we build a serious system to predict and prevent them, and respond to them lawfully and in time?”
The upholding of human rights risks being further eroded by the US decision to sanction the International Criminal Court in The Hague. While the UK has made “strong statements” of their continued support for the court, their next step could be putting in place a “blocking statute” that would make the sanctions unenforceable in the UK, Ms Ahmed said.
The wars in Sudan and in Gaza have featured clear examples of the UK government’s inability to intervene in time, Ms Ahmed said.
She questioned why it had taken the UK months to apply a partial suspension of around 30 out of about 350 arms export licences to Israel for military use in Gaza, which the British government eventually announced in September 2024. Export licensing was one area in which the government could act quickly, by referring to its own criteria and the Arms Trade Treaty, she said.
“They have the duty to prevent genocide and other crimes, but that’s very hard to enforce. But when you have the export-licensing criteria, that’s where we find there’s a space where the government themselves has processes to evaluate.
“I was going in on a weekly basis with either ministers or high-level officials and sometimes middle-ranked officials. We were presenting the evidence. It certainly took longer than it should have,” she said.
“It did so on the basis that Israel couldn’t be found to have a commitment to comply with international law because it was restricting aid.”
Likewise, the UK’s response to the Sudanese civil war had failed to activate “the full plethora of government machinery”, despite its key resolutions on Sudan at the UN Security Council.
With cuts to overseas aid anticipated for the long term, Ms Ahmed – who previously worked as a legal adviser to the FCDO – outlined options that would reinforce the role of human rights in UK foreign policy.
The units involved in human rights and atrocity prevention needed to be “supported at the highest-ministerial level, prioritised, given resources and given the power within the bureaucratic system to have a say when policy decisions are being made,” she said.
Instead, government advisers on human rights policy were often sidelined. “So often, what I have found, is that the human rights directorate aren't key stakeholders in key political decisions,” Ms Ahmed said.
Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband's declaration last month that settler “terrorists” were responsible for “ethnic cleansing” in the West Bank was a major step, Ms Ahmed said.
“That was a really huge development and important to note because it's the first time the government has ever made any such determination and it's clear, given the magnitude of the forced displacement of Palestinians from their land in the West Bank,” she said.
Questions remain about how the UK will implement its most significant foreign policy shift in months – the move to impose sanctions on the expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Foreign Office officials have suggested a six to nine month time frame for initial measures to be implemented but campaigners including Ms Ahmed say this is too long.
“As I understand it, there is a commitment to implementing it in a way that’s effective,” she said. “The devil will be in the detail to ensure that they in fact do that.”
Amnesty International and other organisations are calling on the government to make sure the ban extends to banks and financial services that work with companies involved in illegal settlements.
“It’s not just about goods and services to settlements. It’s also about the financial enabling of the occupation … which are involved in continuing the financial stability of the settlements,” Ms Ahmed said.
