The Foreign Office has spent almost £13,000 on branded merchandise and sweets in its campaign to get a judge who supports the Chagos Surrender installed in the International Court of Justice. Do the HMRC school ambassadors have anything to say about that to the kids?
In response to a question from Nick Timothy the government said:
“The successful campaign in support of Professor Akande’s candidacy for election to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) means that a UK judge will once again sit on the ICJ bench following a nine-year absence. This outcome underlines the UK’s commitment to the international rule of law. The total spent on branded items since 4 July 2024 was £12,723.71.”
Acting for Zambia in Mauritius’ 2019 case at the ICJ, Akande supported the motion calling for the UK to give away the Chagos Islands “as rapidly as possible.” He argued the case was “about the international law obligations regarding decolonisation” and that it should not be seen as a “purely bilateral dispute.”
Akande, a legal scholar at Oxford, also advised the Corbyn Labour opposition in 2018 that the UK’s bombing of Syria did not comply with international law following the notorious Douma chemical attack. He additionally co-authored an article arguing that triggering the Trident deterrent “would not be acting lawfully” and would be “neither necessary nor proportional for either repelling an on-going attack or for stopping an imminent one.”
The spending includes £8,011.77 on branded sweets and £1,574.48 on ‘accessories’. Those will leave a bitter taste…
Lucy Powell told Sky News that the Ed Miliband-Russell Brand interview happened in part because the ‘social media age’ had not begun by 2015:
“Look, I mean, he approached the Labour Party, he approached the campaign team, and we’re in very different times now. We weren’t in the social media age at the time – where you could maybe search things up and see allegations about somebody at the time. and as I say, if there was any suggestion at all, we were dealing with someone who was a known sexual predator at the time, then, of course, you know, no one would have done that. But as I say, he was a well known public figure. Lots of people from Hollywood to the BBC to many others gave this person a very, very powerful platform. And we didn’t know at the time, unfortunately. It was a different era.”