Gaza is enduring a genocide: GLAN statement at High Court

13 May 2025, Gearóid Ó Cuinn, Founder and Director of Glan delivered a speech outside the High Court of Justice: We are here today because the UK government continues to supply weapons to Israel — even as it commits relentless atrocities and ruthlessly imposes famine on Gaza.  

What is happening in Gaza defies belief. Leading jurists, legal experts, and scholars across the UK and internationally, have been clear: this is textbook genocide. Just last week, Josep Borrell — the EU’s former top diplomat — called it such and described it as “the largest ethnic cleansing operation since the Second World War.”  

We are seeing families burned alive in tents, amputations without anaesthesia and children’s malnourished bodies no longer be able to heal from the wounds inflicted on them by Israel. Orphans are surviving alone amongst the ruins. Entire families are being annihilated in their homes. 

And yet, the UK government invokes “international peace and security” to justify sending parts for Israel’s warplane of choice — the F-35. 

How can the arming of a genocide contribute to international peace and security? Whose peace and security do these weapons serve? 

In his former life as a human rights lawyer – Keir Starmer has himself argued genocide in front of the International Court of Justice – in 2014, that it had been committed by Serbia against Croatia between 1991-95. He described, in his own words: 

“A sustained campaign of shelling; systematic expulsion; denial of food, water, electricity, sanitation and medical treatment; bombing; burning; brutal killings and torture which reduced buildings to rubble and destroyed its population.” 

Those words could easily describe the situation in Gaza now.  

And yet today, as political leader, he refuses to admit what is clear. That crime of crimes is occurring in Gaza.  

In 2014, in front of the ICJ he said ‘Genocide is not a number game’.  His Foreign Secretary now tells Parliament that not enough people have died in Gaza for it to qualify. The hypocrisy is grotesque. 

Starmer’s refusal to say the word and acknowledge genocide is not just utterly shameful it is a flagrant violation of international and domestic law. The UK has a clearcut obligation to prevent geocide. 

It must halt arms exports. It must end intelligence sharing, spy plane flights, diplomatic shielding, and military training that aid and abet Israel. 

Starmer is hiding behind the UK’s so-called “long-standing position” — that only a competent court can decide genocide. 

By that logic, we are told to wait. Wait until the rubble is swept away. Wait until the graves are filled. Wait until the beach resorts are built on the bones of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Only then, perhaps, will the UK consider its “duty to prevent.” 

This absurdity makes a mockery of the genocide convention and UK law.  

So we gather today — outside the Royal Courts of Justice — to reject these legal absurdities and affirm what jurists, scholars, and genocide experts around the world already recognise: Gaza is enduring a genocide and states like the UK have to end their support for Israel. 

Whatever the court decides, we are here to say to Keir Starmer and his colleagues: through your military support for Israel, you are complicit. You will be held to account. 

We are proud to support Al-Haq in bringing this case. And we thank the public — all of you — for standing on the side of justice. "