Douglas Ross had his first real opportunity to do the right thing and stand up to Boris Johnson - not just for Scotland , but the whole of the UK , and he blew it
If he can't even get this right .....so much for the party of law and order
I know it's only from the Telegraph , and from a Former Foreign Secretary but it does state the case pretty succinctly
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/20 ... -exposed/
It will not have been easy for Geoffrey Cox, a Conservative MP and strong supporter of Brexit, to say that he could not back the proposals in the Internal Market Bill that the Government admits will breach international law. By all accounts he had protracted discussions with Downing Street before coming to his view that “it is unconscionable that this country, justly famous for its regard for the rule of law around the world, should act in such a way”.
He spoke with the experience and authority of a former attorney general. I have the different perspective of a former foreign secretary. But I come to the same conclusion. For this country to enact a law deliberately abrogating an international treaty even in “a specific and limited way”, as the Northern Ireland Secretary described it, would be a serious foreign policy error. It would have a lasting and damaging effect on our international reputation and standing, diminishing our ability to exert our influence and protect our interests.
In the four years I spent at the Foreign Office, I doubt there was a single day that I did not rely on international law – the body of treaties, conventions and agreements that we and other nations have signed over the years – in some shape or form. Every time we ask for consular access to a British national held in a foreign prison we are basing our argument on international law, as Dominic Raab has done in the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, held in Iran. Every day that we seek fair treatment for a British company with operations overseas against unfair taxation, or confiscation of assets, or discriminatory exclusion from a domestic market, we refer to international law.
When we send British naval ships through the South China Sea to maintain freedom of navigation despite Chinese claims, we are asserting such law. When RAF fighters see off Russian planes intruding into our airspace we are upholding it. When we designate parts of the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean as Marine Protected Areas we are wholly reliant on it, since we could not possibly police such vast zones.
So international law is not some abstract concept that only comes up occasionally. It matters to British people every hour of every day. And we have always been in a strong position to make use of it because our forebears were among its principal architects. It was Britain’s leaders in the late nineteenth century who chose to settle disputes with the United States through legal proceedings rather than brute force, and then championed the role of the Permanent Court of Arbitration. British experts have been at the forefront of the work of the international legal institutions at The Hague, and all British governments have accepted as compulsory the jurisdiction of the modern International Court of Justice.
This is not just because we are an enlightened and broad-minded people. It happens to be massively in the interests of the United Kingdom to be a strong upholder of binding international rules. We are a country particularly exposed to risk around the world, with the greatest financial centre on earth, large trade flows and citizens who like to travel a great deal. More than most countries we need to know that laws are kept and debts are paid. Over the centuries, we have become so noted for our reliability and expertise that people all over the globe want to settle their disputes under English law. Such pre-eminence has heightened our influence and soft power even while our physical power in the world has diminished.
Yet the concept of international law has also, for Britain, reached far beyond even this day-to-day importance. It has provided the foundation and justification for some of our most momentous decisions as a nation. The declaration of war in 1914 was specifically to uphold a treaty commitment to Belgian neutrality, in contrast to the decision by Germany to regard that as “a scrap of paper”. The establishment of the Nuremberg trials in 1945 was, in the words of the prosecution, “to utilise international law to meet the greatest menace of our times – aggressive war”.
Successive Prime Ministers have justified their actions abroad on this basis. In 1982, Margaret Thatcher cited “international law must be upheld” as one of three guiding principles of her position on the Falklands. When Russia carried out the Salisbury poisonings on our soil two years ago, Theresa May asked for and received the support of other countries on the basis that it was “about the role of the Russian state in the development of chemical weapons, contrary to international law”. It is on a similar basis that the UK today objects to acts of aggression, such as the use of chemical weapons by Assad, or the breach of treaties, as seen in China’s recent actions in Hong Kong.
Against the background of this long tradition, it is no small thing for ministers to embark on purposefully and consciously seeking to disregard the international law embodied in the EU Withdrawal Treaty. Irrespective of their justification or the provisional nature of their intentions, this course of action is bound to undermine their authority in international relations and that of their successors.
That authority could be needed very soon. In the event of no deal being reached with the EU, the UK will have particular need of upholding global rules. If some EU members make it difficult for our exports, we will no doubt call to our aid the rules of the World Trade Organisation. And if the fishing boats of other countries intrude into our waters, we will rely on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. All of this is international law, and to set the precedent of breaking it is a very bad idea indeed.
If the EU does not act in good faith over the Northern Ireland protocol, the best recourse is to use arbitration and proportionate measures as provided for in the agreement already signed and ratified. In that scenario, ministers would have a far more sympathetic parliament and supportive international opinion than if they seek unilaterally to override an agreement they entered into only last year.
Whenever I spoke as foreign secretary about the upholding of laws and treaties, to the UN or any errant state, I did so with the utter confidence that my country stood on solid ground. We undermine that ground at our peril.
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