UK silks, solicitors, and ex-judges call for stronger Israel sanctions

Lawyers, legal academics, and ex-judges in the UK have urged UK prime minister Andy Burnham to strengthen sanctions against Israeli settlements.

The Law Society Gazette reported that 15 silks and over 30 solicitors were among the signatories of a six-page letter calling for the extension of UK sanctions to include insurance, accountancy services, and digital infrastructure. The letter was sent to Burnham on September 15 after foreign secretary Ed Miliband announced on September 8 that the UK would be blocking the importation of goods from Israeli illegal settlements in the West Bank.

In particular, the letter suggested imposing the following:

• Enforcing the ban without delay, enacting legislation as necessary
• Extending the ban to the supply by UK persons and businesses of insurance and reinsurance, professional, legal and accountancy services, logistics, and digital and technical infrastructure to settlement enterprises, and the provision of investment or financing that facilitates settlement expansion
• Setting on a statutory footing the current advisory guidance to business with clear due diligence obligations and a published designation of impacted entities
• Providing public confirmation that UK public bodies, pension schemes, or sovereign funds do not or will hold investments in Israeli settlements
• Effecting the sanctions regime presented by the foreign secretary
• Defining the scope of “religious exemptions”
• Ensuring that funds raised by UK-registered charities and the related tax relief are not directly or indirectly used to support settlement activities
• Evaluating bilateral trade arrangements, procurement, and exporting licensing
• Confirming the enforcement of the extended designation power before the closing of the E1 tender on October 19
• Imposing a full arms embargo on Israel

“We welcome the UK government’s decision to act alongside its allies, Canada and France, but the action covered in the recent announcement falls far short of what these suppression obligations require. We ask it to commit to further and more rigorous measures to ensure that no part of the UK’s economic relationship with Israel continues to sustain the illegal occupation itself, and the settlements and other serious violations of fundamental rules of international law perpetrated through its conduct, and to build on this to adopt robust coercive measures to seek to bring all these serious violations of international law, and the practices they sustain, including, fundamentally, the occupation itself, to an end,” the letter said.