Philippe Sands’ comments, accusing the Conservatives of playing into an antisemitic trope, were dismissed as an “absurd smear” by the Tories.
LONDON — Leading human rights barrister Philippe Sands accused the Conservative Party of betraying the legacy of Winston Churchill and of leaning into antisemitic tropes with its attack on the role of lawyers in the British government.
Sands, who has represented Mauritius at the International Court of Justice in several disputes over the Chagos Islands, made the intervention following months of angry recriminations by leading Tories over Keir Starmer’s proposed deal to transfer the territory to the Mauritians.
Under the plan, the U.K. government would hand Mauritius sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago, made up of more than 60 islands in the Indian Ocean, following a 2019 ruling from the International Court of Justice to allow Chagossians to return.
The deal comes with a price tag of at least £9 billion and, according to critics, would open the region — home of a crucial U.S.-U.K. military base at Diego Garcia — to increased Chinese influence.
Conservative Leader Kemi Badenoch last week accused Starmer of “an immoral surrender” over the Chagos Islands, undertaken so that “north London lawyers can boast at their dinner parties.”
Badenoch renewed her line of attack Wednesday, saying there are “very serious questions” around the PM’s friend and attorney general, Richard Hermer.
“We need to make sure we appoint people who believe in our country and everything we stand for. It is not clear the attorney general does,” she said at PMQs.
Sands told POLITICO in an interview that the leader of the opposition and others had made “comments about ‘North London lawyers’ — words which some who I speak to understand to be a trope of a most unfortunate kind.”
When pressed, Sands confirmed that those he had spoken to saw those words as aimed at Jewish lawyers.
Sands has a Jewish background, as do Hermer and the Justice Minister Sarah Sackman. Parts of North London have traditionally been home to a high proportion of the capital’s Jewish population. Starmer’s parliamentary constituency is also in North London.
A Conservative spokesman said of Sands’ remarks: “This is an absurd smear.”
They added that Labour’s “desperate surrender” of the Chagos Islands “made clear that the prime minister and his left-wing friends are more concerned with being human rights lawyers than standing up for Britain and our national interest.”
Sands, who is professor of laws at University College London, further criticized the Tories for appearing to take sides with Donald Trump, accusing them of scoffing at international law and multilateral institutions.
“You really want cross-party support in forging a position,” he said, “because this is a fundamental challenge to the place of the United Kingdom in the world.”
Instead, he argued, “the Conservative Party seems to have turned its back on its own accomplishments,” citing the post-1945 settlement which was carved out by Winston Churchill, and Margaret Thatcher’s 1990 speech identifying the threat from climate change.
Starmer and Hermer have both been accused in recent months of letting their respective backgrounds as high-profile lawyers cloud their political judgment.
In particular, opponents claim they are in thrall to a “Matrix Chambers mindset” which pursues a progressive approach to international law above Britain’s national interests.
