20 Aug 2024

So, and it is absolutely important this is understood, the right to fight
against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes is
not only an absolute right in international law, it is also a specific right in
UK law.

And UK law further specifically recognises that when fighting colonial
domination, alien occupation and a racist regime you do not have to wear
uniform.

Applying this to 7 October, it means that those armed Palestinian combatants who
were not members of a proscribed organisation (see below) were engaged in legal
armed struggle in terms of UK law, provided they respected international
humanitarian law in so doing.

Which makes the recent clarifications that the majority of civilian casualties
were killed by the IDF and that the mass rapes and beheaded babies stories were
a total fabrication, still more important.

Every colonial or racist power that has ever faced armed resistance has always
characterised the native peoples resisting as "terrorists", "savages" or
similar. Asymmetric warfare is by nature unconventional. The systematic and
often legalised atrocities of the coloniser will indeed often spark uncontrolled
acts of rage that rightly fall outside what international humanitarian law will
condone.

So we now have the situation that Richard Medhurst is arrested for allegedly
supporting armed resistance that is not only undeniably legal in international
law but is also specifically legal in British law.

The source of this conundrum is the extraordinarily arbitrary power of
proscribing an organisation.

Now to proscribe an organisation the government does not have to prove its
actions were illegal, either under international law or UK law. An organisation
is proscribed simply on the basis that the government says so.

If the government proscribed the Girl Guides, you could get up to 14 years in
jail for expressing support for the Girl Guides, and no amount of argument in
court that the Girl Guides is not in fact a terrorist organisation would help
you.

Hamas and Hezbollah are acting legally in UK law in terms of the Geneva
Convention First Protocol Order of 1998, but expressing support for them is
nevertheless illegal because the proscription of an organisation is an entirely
arbitrary power of the executive.
-- Cont'd at https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2024/08/richard-medhurst-and-the-right-to-armed-resistance/