Another day, another bit of bad press for the Labour party. Attorney General Lord Hermer sparked outrage when he compared political threats to leave the ECHR to the Nazis during a speech to the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RUSI) defence think tank on Thursday – and has since acknowledged, rather begrudgingly, that his ‘choice of words was clumsy’. You don’t say!
Mr S is rather curious about who exactly gave the controversial phraseology the green light – if it was approved at all. The speech appeared on the official government website after it was delivered, with the Attorney General’s baffling comparison retained in black and white. The questionable passage reads:
The claim that international law is fine as far as it goes, but can be put aside when conditions change, is a claim that was made in the early 1930s by ‘realist’ jurists in Germany most notably Carl Schmitt, whose central thesis was in essence the claim that state power is all that counts, not law.
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