The anti-boycott Bill targets the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in solidarity with Palestine. It is openly a bid to enforce British foreign policy on all public bodies: Communities Secretary Michael Gove claims councils, universities or other institutions which seek to make ethical decisions on how to spend or invest funds are guilty of “pursuing their own foreign policy agenda.”
In banning public bodies from taking stances on international questions at odds with that of central government, the law is part of the creeping enforced conformity chilling democratic debate in Britain, reflected in Tory anti-protest legislation, Labour’s relentless search for heretics to expel and the online censorship of alternative and foreign media in the name of combating “disinformation.”
The cross-party consensus on stripping us of our democratic rights is evident here too. Though Labour proposed a “reasoned amendment,” setting out objections to the Bill without actually amending it, it instructed its MPs to abstain when that fell rather than oppose the legislation.
In an interview with Jewish News, shadow communities secretary Lisa Nandy stressed the party’s support for a ban on BDS, saying Labour’s only concerns were that the Bill might also stop councils boycotting other countries, namely China: suggesting Labour would police enforced alignment with British foreign policy even more closely than the Tories. Her concerns are misplaced, anyway: the Bill breaks new ground by explicitly referencing Israel, giving it a unique impunity from activist pressure under British law, as well as by specifying that it should also cover the occupied West Bank and Golan Heights, endorsing Israel’s illegal colonisation projects in practice while continuing to oppose them formally.
“Still we are not acting with the urgency and determination that is required,” the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said Monday.
As parts of the world from China to Texas bake under extreme heat, scientists and advocates are warning that world leaders are running out of time to take action on the climate crisis.
In a speech to a United Nations panel discussion on Monday,, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk cautioned that current policies put the planet on course for a “dystopian future.”
“Yet still we are not acting with the urgency and determination that is required. Leaders perform the choreography of deciding to act and promising to act and then… get stuck in the short term,” Türk said.
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Türk’s remarks came after Reuters ran an article highlighting recent weather extremes and land- and sea-temperature records. Scientists warn that the clock is running out on the chance of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.
“We’ve run out of time because change takes time,” University of New South Wales climate scientist Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick told Reuters.
Early June 2023 was the hottest on record, with average temperatures even overshooting the 1.5°C mark for a few days. While this has happened before during the Northern Hemisphere winter, this was the first time it has happened during the Northern Hemisphere summer, according to Reuters.
At the same time, sea surface temperatures broke records in both April and May. Temperatures in the Indian and Pacific oceans could rise to 3°C warmer than normal by October, Australia’s weather agency said, according to Reuters.
“We know that our environment is burning. It’s melting. It’s flooding. It’s depleting. It’s drying. It’s dying.”
University of Leeds professor of climate physics Piers Forster told Reuters that the climate crisis was predominantly to blame, but that El Niño, a drop in dust from the Sahara blowing over the ocean, and a turn to low-sulfur shipping fuels that reduced atmospheric particulates also contributed.
“So in all, oceans are being hit by a quadruple whammy,” he said. “It’s a sign of things to come.”
Other signs of things to come include the wildfires burning in Canada, which is in the midst of its worst fire season on record, as AFP reported June 28. The fires have displaced more than 100,000 people, sent toxic smoke spewing south and east, and released a record almost 600 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Places from India to the southern U.S. have sweltered through deadly heat waves. On Thursday, several states in the South and Midwest had reached the highest threat level for their wet bulb temperature—the temperature of a thermometer covered in a wet cloth which is meant to simulate how the human body would react to a combination of heat and humidity in full sun, as The Hill reported. Studies have shown that the human body cannot sweat to cool down when heat and humidity reach certain levels—the most recent research points to a threshold of 88°F at 100% humidity.
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On Sunday, Chinese authorities said that the country had broken records for the number of hot days during the first six months of the year, with Beijing breaking its all-time temperature record to hit a high of 41.1°C on Thursday, as CNN reported.
When the capital finally saw relief Monday, flooding displaced more than 10,000 people in Hunan province, and Shaanxi province’s Zhenba county experienced its worst flooding in 50 years, according to the Independent.
“We know that our environment is burning. It’s melting. It’s flooding. It’s depleting. It’s drying. It’s dying,” Türk said during his remarks Monday.
Türk warned that conditions could get even more extreme if global temperatures rise to around 3°C, which current policies put them on track to do, according to the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“Vast territories would disappear under rising oceans, or become effectively uninhabitable, due to heat and lack of water,” he said.
Türk’s speech was focused on the right to food specifically, and how the climate crisis would continue to interfere with it. Between 2000 and 2023, there had already been a 134% increase in climate and flood disasters, he said.
“More than 828 million people faced hunger in 2021,” he said. “And climate change is projected to place up to 80 million more people at risk of hunger by the middle of this century—creating a truly terrifying scale of desperation and need.”
Yet so far, political and corporate leaders are not responding to the situation with the urgency experts and advocates say it requires. The Bonn climate talks, which occurred amidst the record early June heat, ended with little progress.
“I am hoping that the sheer reality will help us change people’s moves and change the politics.”
“It was very detached from what was going on outside of the building in Bonn—I was very disappointed by that,” Li Shuo, Greenpeace’s senior climate adviser in Beijing, told Reuters.
The next major international climate conference—COP28—begins in the United Arab Emirates in late November, but campaigners are concerned by the fact that its president, Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, is also the head of the UAE’s state oil company.
Meanwhile, Li and Türk still expressed hope for 11th-hour progress.
“We are really getting to the moment of truth,” Li told Reuters. “I am hoping that the sheer reality will help us change people’s moves and change the politics.”
Türk recommended a list of actions including an end to fossil fuel subsidies, a phaseout of fossil fuel use, and a “just transition to a green economy.”
He also said that COP28 needed to be a “decisive game-changer.”
“There is still time to act,” he said. “But that time is now. We must not leave this for our children to fix—no matter how inspiring their activism. The people who must act—who have the responsibility to act—are our leaders, today.”
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Friday (30 June) that it uncovered new evidence of the indiscriminate use by Ukrainian forces of banned anti-personnel landmines against Russian troops who invaded Ukraine in 2022.
The group called on Ukraine’s government to follow through with a commitment made earlier this month not to employ such weapons, investigate their suspected use and hold accountable those responsible.
“The Ukrainian government’s pledge to investigate its military’s apparent use of banned anti-personnel mines is an important recognition of its duty to protect civilians,” Steve Goose, Human Rights Watch’s arms director, said in a statement.
HRW said it shared its findings with the Ukrainian government in a May letter to which it received no response.
The Israeli use of administrative detention, a controversial practice that allows the Israeli occupation to hold suspects without trial for months or even years, has reached its highest level since 2003, according to a report by an Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem.
B’Tselem said that as of November 2021, there were 1,128 Palestinians in administrative detention, including 10 minors and two women. The group said this was the largest number of such detainees since the end of the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, in 2003.
The group accused the Israeli occupation of using administrative detention as a “tool of oppression” and a “means of collective punishment” against Palestinians, especially those involved in political or social activism. It said that most of the detainees were held based on secret evidence that they and their lawyers could not challenge in court.
Anti-boycott law would have forced public bodies to do business with racist South Africa in the 1980s – and will force them to do business with apartheid, racist Israel now
Parliamentary friends of apartheid visit the illegal wall
The government has published its ‘anti-boycott bill’, which aims to prevent public bodies from choosing not to use products or services from countries with appalling human rights records – and in particular, to neuter the pro-Palestinian ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ (BDS) campaign against the use of products, services and companies involved in illegal Israeli expansion onto Palestinian territory.
BDS has long been targeted by official and ‘cut-out’ organisations of the Israeli government, which has rightly been condemned by human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and, in Israel, B’Tselem, for its apartheid policies that the latest hard-right regime is entrenching even further – and the apartheid regime is avidly supported by the Tories (and ‘without qualification’ by the so-called ‘opposition leader’ Keir Starmer.
So there is no expectation of any significant parliamentary opposition to the bill and it is left to human and civil rights campaigners and organisations to mount resistance, such as Liberty, which has today published a statement on the anti-democratic bill, co-signed by unions, human rights groups and others, noting that such a policy would have forced public bodies to do business with apartheid South Africa and scuppered the campaign that eventually helped bring down that regime:
As a group of civil society organisations made up of trade unions, charities, NGOs, faith, climate justice, human rights, cultural, campaigning, and solidarity organisations, we advocate for the right of public bodies to decide not to purchase or procure from, or invest in companies involved in human rights abuse, abuse of workers’ rights, destruction of our planet, or any other harmful or illegal acts. We therefore oppose the government’s proposed law to stop public bodies from taking such actions.
The government has indicated that a main intention of any legislation is to ensure that public bodies follow UK foreign policy in their purchasing, procurement, and investment decisions, particularly relating to Israel and Palestine. We are concerned that this would prevent public bodies from deciding not to invest in or procure from companies complicit in the violation of the rights of the Palestinian people. We affirm that it is the right of public bodies to do so, and in fact a responsibility to break ties with companies contributing to abuses of rights and violations of international law in occupied Palestine and anywhere else where such acts occur.
From bus boycotts against racial segregation to divestment from fossil fuel companies to arms embargoes against apartheid, boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaigns have been applied throughout history to put economic, cultural, or political pressure on a regime, institution, or company to force it to change abusive, discriminatory, or illegal policies. If passed, this law will stifle a wide range of campaigns concerned with the arms trade, climate justice, human rights, international law, and international solidarity with oppressed peoples struggling for justice. The proposed law presents a threat to freedom of expression, and the ability of public bodies and democratic institutions to spend, invest and trade ethically in line with international law and human rights.
We call on the UK government to immediately halt this bill, on opposition parties to oppose it and on civil society to mobilise in support of the right to boycott in the cause of justice.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has also spoken out to underline the importance of BDS in opposing apartheid and pledge his support in fighting the latest anti-democracy bill:
Boycott, divestment and sanctions helped end apartheid in South Africa.
They will be essential to ending the apartheid regime in Israel, too.
I will firmly oppose the government’s anti-BDS bill — a disgraceful attack on our freedom to fight for human rights, justice and peace.
The evening has also seen the Glastonbury festival cancel its planned showing of the excellent film exposing the sabotage of Corbyn’s Labour and the smear campaign against him – many are presuming that his principled stand and the cowardly Glastonbury decision are not unconnected.
