Law and Justice?

After the riots all over the Continent, and with the Far Right on course to win power both in France and in Germany, the European Union is at this very moment staging a coup in Poland.

The EU that we left was bad enough, but even that no longer exists. Join this? We would have to be out of our minds.

Nothing Cryptic About It

If North Korea is an unelectrified joke, then how could it have a nuclear weapons programme, why should we be frightened of a few thousand of its troops in Kursk, and how could it have taken down Binance, the name of which had four more letters than it needed? The speculative value of cryptocurrencies is hurtling towards their intrinsic value of zero. A suspicious number of those who decry us sceptics of the cashless society also claim that we are under constant threat of cyberattacks, and a surprising number of those who are forthright against the cashless society are enthusiasts for cryptocurrencies, about which the clue is in the name. In the cashless economy, every penny that we spent would be tracked. Cryptocurrencies are beyond democratic political control. The combination of the two would be, and increasingly is, that level of tracking by those who were thus unaccountable. If the North Koreans have paused or halted that process, then they have done the world a favour.

Bankrolled by Christopher Harborne, Reform UK proposes a Sovereign Bitcoin Reserve Fund. How is that looking now? Instead, as Jackdaw is opened up and as we hope for Rosebank, the talk is of a proper sovereign wealth fund. That is opposed only by those who cannot accept that Margaret Thatcher did anything wrong, not even when she lost this country a trillion pounds by not creating a Norwegian-style sovereign wealth fund with the profits from North Sea oil, and by those who cannot accept that any good idea was ever had by Tony Benn, who in fact founded the National Enterprise Board, which invested in Acorn Computing, which in turn helped to develop the ARM Processors that are found in all iPhones, so that all iPhones are Bennite.

Even without the sovereign wealth fund to buy it, the case for the renationalisation of water has been made yet again by the sacking, or whatever you preferred to call it, of Nicola Shaw. Water privatisation has indisputably failed, and the shares in the companies are monetarily worthless (what would you pay for them?), so bring on lock, stock and barrel renationalisation, leading to the National Grid that was promised by Labour in 1979. Just do it. Now. The Parliament of the United Kingdom may legislate over and above any devolved body, and the people of Scotland and Wales would love this arrangement once they had it. Nothing has weakened the Union, and democratic national and parliamentary sovereignty, more than privatisation. While there are grey areas, if something would obviously have to be rescued by the State rather than allowed to go bust, then it belongs in public ownership, just as if something obviously would not, then it does not. Corner shops? Obviously not. But water? Obviously.

Likewise, it is obviously welcome both economically and strategically that the Ministry of Defence should buy British wherever possible and require offsets wherever it had to do otherwise. As with the zero rating of VAT on dometic power, it is a clear Brexit benefit that it should be free to do so. But let that be only the start. BAE Systems should be renationalised as the monopoly supplier to our own Armed Forces, with a ban on all sale of arms abroad, and with a comprehensive programme of diversification in the spirit of the Lucas Plan. And instead of Trident, an extra £70 billion should be given to each of the Royal Navy, the British Army, and the Royal Air Force. That would not entail depriving anything else of funding. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, the United Kingdom has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with the fiscal and monetary means to control inflation, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control in both cases.

Green Light?

If Zia Yusuf was wrong, then Alastair Campbell should sue him. Having been Groom of the Stool both to Robert Maxwell and to Tony Blair, at 69 Campbell still has absolutely no self-awareness. But then, where would he have acquired any? None of the Iraq mob has ever suffered professionally. Quite the reverse, in fact. 90 per cent of the British population saw through the Iraq War from the start, but none of the 60 million of us has ever been deemed capable of assuming any of those wholly discredited individuals’ positions in public life. Campbell should be given Allison Pearson’s column in the Daily Telegraph, not because I bear him any good will, but just for the fun of it in so many directions.

Campbell has never rejoined the Labour Party, which, like the Liberal Democrats, is now taking in disgruntled Green councillors. Until the point of defection, each of those had at least pretended to believe that Zack Polanski ought to become Prime Minister. Polanski has never been a spokesman for the British Red Cross, he has never been a spokesman for Make Votes Matter, he has never been a full member of the National Council for Hypnotherapy, and he has never worked for the nonexistent “justice assessment committee” of the Ministry of Justice. But he did fail to pay Council Tax on his narrowboat despite having been registered to vote there, he did fail to register to vote anywhere in the local elections this year, and he did take payment to hypnotise women so that their breasts would grow bigger.

The Greens are the British party for which Noam Chomsky would vote, so taking in their refugees formally admits to the Epstein Class the Lib Dems who were the more pro-austerity and pro-war party to the Coalition when Polanski stood as a Lib Dem for the Camden Borough Council seat of St Pancras and Somers Town, in the Holborn and St Pancras constituency that he recently failed to win as a Green. Polanski had joined the Lib Dems during the Coalition, but they now provide a happy home to Greens for whom even he was too left-wing.

Meanwhile, with deep reactionary roots, the Greens are a party of anti-industrial Malthusianism and misanthropy, and therefore of NATO and the EU, of their war in Ukraine, of the conscription to which that was leading inexorably, of Scottish and Welsh separatism, of gender self-identification, of drug legalisation, of licensed prostitution, and of Peter Tatchell. So yes, interchangeable with Labour, then.

The Green Party was all of those things on the day before its recent conference, yet just as the Old Greens are not making a fuss about its hugely significant abandonment of its opposition to nuclear power, so there was no talk of a firewall until it passed a resolution stating the view of most of the relatively few people in Britain who had much of an opinion on Zionism. Polanski was defeated at Holborn and St Pancras because he was as described above, not because of that resolution.

But how does that resolution look now, anyway? Israel was not an apartheid state because the Arabs were “allowed” vote, but they barely did, so that once they did in such numbers at to end up with the potential balance of power, then that must have been because of the kind of foreign interference that the implacable opponents of Brexit or of Donald Trump were wont to allege? And Zionism required no inclusion of the Arab-led parties in government no matter how well they had done, even if that required further elections, quite possibly on a more restricted franchise, or with a higher threshold, or with the Arab-led parties banned, or with all of those measures? If that is not racism, then what is it? And if that is not racism, then what is?

The World of Nathan Cofnas

The Jason Arday affair has repeatedly been shown to have been nothing like as bad, or even as unusual, as it was presented, and there may well be more such correction to come. The whole thing was got up over the summer to distract from the true scandal of Lola Salem, itself extending to the emergence of a Parisian-style Far Right intellectual and cultural scene in London with connections to the very hearts of Reform UK and the Conservative Party. The self-appointed inquiry into Arday announced its existence and composition in one of the two magazines closest to Salem and to the already convicted Henry Hopwood-Phillips. And proving that he still held the United Kingdom visa that he needed to address a Reform event, but which the Labour Government had denied to Andreas Malm to address a Tribune one, Nathan Cofnas is to speak at the Oxford college from which Salem had been suspended, as Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff writes:

When I heard that Nathan Cofnas – the self-described “race realist” who spearheaded a campaign against Jason Arday, the Black, former Cambridge professor whose academic work prompted unrelenting scrutiny before his untimely death – was due to speak at Oxford University’s Oriel College next month, I wasn’t surprised. Only a few months ago, the university union had hosted Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson), one of the most dangerous far-right men in the country who was actively responsible for stirring up race riots across the summer. I was, however, disgusted.

This column will not be another treatise on the right or wrongs of free speech; we have been there and done that. But what I am interested in is the world of elite academia, of which most of us have only ever skimmed the surface. By my reckoning, the world of Nathan Cofnas is dank, self-obsessed and manages to be both deeply hypocritical and highly illogical while utterly convinced of its superiority. This is a man who, in the weeks after Arday’s death, appeared on right-wing podcasts decrying a peaceful vigil as an “anti-Cofnas hate rally”. Cofnas has claimed if he had set foot in central London that evening, he would have been murdered. I attended the vigil, and it was flooded with tears and sorrow at the premature loss of Arday by those who loved him.

A couple of years ago, I went to an exhibition in London’s Wellcome Collection by artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, titled Genetic Automata; it explored race science and eugenics. In the first room were artefacts, mostly from the beginning of the 20th century: a swatch of different hair textures and colours, neatly labelled; a collection of glass eyes used as part of an antisemitic study to compare the irises of children alongside a set of sepia-toned photographs; a device that measured the heads of individuals to make judgments on their intelligence or supposed affinity towards criminality. None would be out of place in a sci-fi show: they were terrifying, and ridiculous.

What these objects reminded me of, as someone who has engaged with interest in the (very British) history of race science, reading the work of geneticist Adam Rutherford and science journalist Angela Saini in particular, was just how dehumanising it is at its core. As Saini wrote in her 2019 book, Superior: The Return of Race Science, “Mainstream scientists, geneticists and medical researchers still invoke race and use these categories in their work, even though we have been told for 70 years that they have no biological meaning, that they have only social meaning… Racial injustice and inequality in their minds isn’t injustice or inequality at all. It’s there because the racial hierarchy is real.” On the growth in right-wing “race realists” such as Cofnas, she accurately predicted that they have been playing a “waiting game” – waiting for the right time to espouse their views publicly and virulently. “The public assumed that the extremes of scientific racism were dead, when in fact they were always active under the radar,” she wrote. The time, unfortunately it seems, is now.

Cofnas is a part of a dark and dangerous legacy, so grotesque it is fit for a horror movie (think: the most gruesome aspects of the transatlantic slave trade and the Holocaust). It takes a sick-minded and corrupted individual to decide to spend their life’s work dedicated to this field of “study”; to spend their time looking for genetic differences in intelligence, even though the former of which has been debunked time and time again, and the latter of which is inherently subjective. How many times is it necessary to say that race is a social construct; that skin colour and phenotype can basically never be a measure of anyone’s inner world? I do not tar Cofnas with the brush of evil lightly. His contributions to academia are, despite his weak protestations, founded on sand, and, from the papers that I’ve read parts of, both dull, damaging and ahistorical. Or, as Rutherford writes, “risible and vapid”.

And so back to Oxford, and the fact that the university’s Reform UK student supporters group has invited students to an evening with the man. Reform has been labelled by Oxford students themselves as the first anti-university party. They are fresh off the back of not one but two major undercover investigations into their racism, and earlier this year their party leader, Nigel Farage, was reminded of the fact that his schoolmates were the victims of his nascent racist behaviour. Thus far, the university hasn’t stepped in to prevent the event going ahead. As put by academic and author Kehinde Andrews, a friend of Arday’s, “This is not an example of Oxford against its values. These are the values of Oxford University.” A place where racist language becomes coded into diatribes about DEI. Where someone like Cofnas can be awarded a PhD [at Oxford?]. “Maybe,” Andrews says, “it's a perfect talk that should be given to remind you all of what the university is.”

Even so, today, an open letter and petition calling for the cancellation of the event, signed by academics and celebrities including Beverly Knight and Zawe Ashton, has been circulated, and I predict the ongoing backlash to the event will be substantial. I completed a fellowship at Oxford during the height of the pro-Palestine encampments and protests – many of the students’ actions were tightly organised, coordinated and deeply politically aligned. Surely, Cofnas’s appearance at the university won’t be met with anything less than that same energy and righteous anger.

The Martin Lewis Budget

Aditya Chakrabortty writes:

Was this Andy Burnham’s budget – the bold vision of a new prime minister who burns with a passion to topple “40 years of neoliberalism”? Fat chance. Was it John Healey’s budget – the repair job of a cautious chancellor fretting about record-high taxes, £3tn of public debt and an economy stuck in first gear? Little sign of that.

This budget was cast in the image of a man who isn’t in Burnham’s government or even a Labour politician – but who appears almost every day on TV, on podcasts and is probably better known than 649 of the MPs at Westminster. Today’s budget was the Martin Lewis budget.

Lewis is the MoneySavingExpert, whose weekly Money Tips email advises 10 million British subscribers on cheap mortgages, Black Friday deals and how to score two pizzas for £10. Tips and tricks to stave off rising prices and make the most of the money you have. Given that the Bayeux tapestry is French, and the Koh-i-noor is Indian, Lewis may be the closest thing Britain has to a genuine national treasure.

Over the past four years, since Russia launched its full-scale war on Ukraine and sent energy prices soaring, Lewis has become more political and wielded greater influence in Westminster. His fingerprints were all over this “red book”. This morning, before the cabinet had even had its traditional pre-budget pep talk, Lewis had gone to Downing Street for a personal briefing from the chancellor on its key measures. On Radio 4’s Today programme, he was the big budget interview, rather than any politician or BBC editor.

No wonder, because the most eye-catching of the budget’s measures had been written by the money saving expert. Scrapping standing charges on gas bills, shielding more pensioners from income tax and fixing energy bill credit against council tax bands – all of these came from Lewis’s wishlist. Beyond policies, he has also informed Burnham’s politics. At last year’s Labour conference, Lewis advised any new prime minister to “pick a hundred things that piss people off and fix them at one a day for the first hundred days”. Et voilà! The King of the North has vowed to end loudcasting on public transport, crack down on unfair parking fines and introduce more drop boxes for the post … and more and more.

For Labour ministers, government by MoneySavingExpert may seem a no-brainer. After a wretched couple of years under Keir Starmer, they can pose as the people’s champion, for ever on your side. Best of all, all these micro-policies cost micro-money. Today’s budget had 98 measures – more than any I can remember in decades of covering fiscal events, yet they all cost trifling sums.

Which brings us to the killer problem: Lewis is one of the most trusted people in Britain. But he’s not a politician. He’s never claimed to be. He speaks the language of terms and conditions, not financialisation – and he knows his limits. To quote a New Statesman essay last week on the new MoneySavingPolitics: “As governments have embraced retail policies and suggestion-box-style politics in his image, Lewis has been raising the alarm that there are too many people who can no longer help themselves and it is time for structural change.”

The difference was clear today. In her first budget, Rachel Reeves announced extra spending worth £74bn by the end of the period. By comparison, Healey announced a grand total of £380m. For all Burnham’s grand ambition and soaring rhetoric, his first budget was only 0.5% of Starmer’s first budget.

This is obviously not how the King of the North wants you to see him. Listen to Burnham speak, and you hear a changemaker, an ideas man, a leader with a 10-year plan. But does he put his money where his mouth is? Does he heck. The anxiety I have heard for months from so many of his advisers and MPs was borne out in this budget: he’s big talk and small stick.

The best line of the day came from Kemi Badenoch. “The prime minister came to power promising to end 40 years of neoliberalism, and instead we got 4p off gherkins,” the Tory leader said, while Burnham and Healey frowned like men caught bang to rights. What’s the point of cut-price marmalade when a few months ago you promised to nationalise Thames Water?

Why, for that matter, chuck out the old boss when the new one is less ambitious? Whacking banks with a tax in order to cut energy costs is good politics, but this new government should have been much more ambitious. A hundred pounds is a token saving when the typical household’s fuel bill is about to top £2,000. Given how harsh this El Niño winter is likely to be, I imagine the government will have to cobble together another intervention before the new year.

Ministers are now caught in a pincer movement between Badenoch to their right, who can argue they aren’t tackling the really big problems and, to their left, the Greens and Plaid, as well as the Scottish nationalists, who will keep on saying they aren’t doing enough for their own voters. In a day of grim economic forecasts, perhaps the worst was from the Office for Budget Responsibility, which said that in the face of high inflation, earnings will not rise at all next year – while 2030 would see households with take-home pay just 2% above where it was before Covid struck in 2020. Put those two figures together and – despite all the Westminster chat – you can forget about a snap election that delivers Labour a new majority.

If ministers can’t offer any protection against an economic outlook that bleak, they will face an angry and mutinous public. If the Labour party wants to be re-elected, it needs to give people a reason to go out and vote for it. Pointing to bond markets isn’t a defence, because markets aren’t in open rebellion. Yes, government borrowing is a lot more expensive than it was in the post-crash years of cheap money and the interest bill on the nation’s debt is high. But no one thinks Britain is France. Gilt traders today looked at a government running down its financial buffer and were completely unruffled. Had Healey borrowed much more to invest in social and cheap housing, he could have argued that such spending would soon enough bring down benefit bills – and markets would have believed him.

I write this as someone who wants Burnham to do well – and certainly to do better than today’s tiny raft of tweaks. Unlike many Labour politicians, he can talk sincerely about where disastrous rightwing politics have led this country. When he promises a new economic and political model, I – and many others – am up for it. In contrast to Starmer he doesn’t act as if he hates 80% of his own party members. Unlike Starmer’s advisers, his team doesn’t subsist on a diet of received wisdom and petty vindictiveness. But at some point, the grand rhetoric and the romantic notions need to cash out into a programme of change. Otherwise, voters will draw the conclusion that this summer’s coup against a recently elected prime minister had no grand motivation apart from saving the skins of Labour MPs and fanning a few egos.

A Martin Lewis budget is fine, but Labour chose Andy Burnham as its leader and the public were promised a Burnham budget. They’re still waiting.

Incredibly Painful To Deliver

If John Smith had lived, then Labour would still have won the 1997 General Election, and Robin Cook would have been Foreign Secretary until the day he died, with all that that would have entailed. But Gordon Brown would still have become Chancellor of the Exchequer and eventually Prime Minister, while the pre-2007 Home Office would have been headed by Tony Blair, meaning that the social authoritarianism of New Labour would still have been implemented. For example, the legislation renaming Stipendiary Magistrates as District Judges goes all the way back to 1999, meaning that a Bench Division has been the intention for a very long time. By that means, it would still be the result of the Courts and Tribunals Bill even in its supposedly moderated form. Thus, and although she is wrong about the Employment Rights Act, such as it is, Sonia Sodha writes:

There is a well-known trick chancellors use to balance the books in tough times. Because the fiscal rules demand that the deficit is eliminated in five years’ time, they promise to cut public spending not in the next couple of years, but later in the cycle. Jam today, dry toast tomorrow. Jeremy Hunt did it, Rachel Reeves did it and so did John Healey in his first budget.

The move has invoked even more scepticism than usual this time because the pain will be augmented by Healey’s pledge to increase defence spending, and the cuts would land just before a 2029 election. The fundamental problem is there is no fat to trim from departments whose spending was hit hard by austerity.

One of the worst affected was justice: the courts and tribunal system has been badly undermined by sustained underfunding. It is a relatively easy area to cut politically; people end up in the courts only when something has gone seriously wrong, so they touch many fewer lives than services such as hospitals and schools. For most of us, the rule of law remains a happily abstract concept and our knowledge of the justice system comes from television dramas.

Today, justice funding is 25 per cent lower per person than it was almost 20 years ago. This shows up in the dilapidated state of court buildings, with their leaking ceilings, asbestos and rat infestations, but also in record backlogs that mean people are waiting many years before their cases get anywhere near resolution.

In criminal trials, this means criminals are more likely to get away with it as witnesses become harder to track down. Victims’ lives are put on hold, and the innocent have charges hanging over them for longer before they are cleared. Sir Keir Starmer’s answer included taking away the right for defendants to be tried by jury for offences attracting a prison sentence of less than three years. Critics rightly pointed out that, for marginal efficiency gains, this would increase the risk of miscarriages of justice for people accused of fairly serious crimes.

Andy Burnham wisely dropped the most controversial aspect of the reforms, judge-only trials for people facing prison sentences of between two and three years. But he has kept the rest: increasing magistrates’ sentencing powers to two years; removing defendants’ right to choose a jury trial in the crown court for mid-tier “either-way” offences; and removing the right to automatically appeal against magistrates’ verdicts to the crown court and have a trial reheard in front of a jury.

There are two problems with this. Juries provide a triple safeguard against convicting the innocent. Ten to 12 fellow citizens — not one judge — must agree someone is guilty based on the evidence. The process of deliberation can help iron out human biases. Jurors have not heard the same defence run over and over, or sentenced countless criminals: they bring a fresh perspective to every case.

Magistrates’ courts, in which charges are tried either by three lay volunteers, or by a single district judge, have historically dealt with minor offences that do not result in prison sentences. Under the government’s reforms, magistrates’ sentencing powers will have quadrupled in only four years, and they will be trying more complex crimes, with serious consequences for reputation and liberty.

The second problem is that the backlog in the magistrates’ courts is even worse than in the crown court. These reforms risk simply moving cases from one horribly overloaded part of the system to another. It is not clear that it is even practically feasible to expect volunteer magistrates, many of whom have day jobs, to go from hearing cases that generally last less than a day to complex multiday trials.

Things are no better when it comes to employment disputes. The recourse for employees who have been unfairly sacked or discriminated against is an employment tribunal. But the waiting list has grown and, in a system that was originally supposed to dispense user-friendly, speedy justice, cases are routinely taking three or more years to make it to a full hearing, rendering it near-impossible for workers to meaningfully enforce their rights. In the face of these delays, many give up and move on, leaving the worst employers to get away with unlawful practice. Artificial intelligence has made the problem worse as employees without lawyers use it to draft pages and pages of claims that take longer for the system to digest.

Ministers risk making the situation worse through the Employment Rights Act, which lays out a host of new rights including giving more employees rights against unfair dismissal, expanding employer liability for third-party harassment and allowing employees more time to submit legal claims. There is a danger that introducing more rights into the system further increases the backlog. The government is also lifting the cap on unfair dismissal claims in a way that will be of little benefit to workers on average wages but will incentivise the highest earners to bring big, complex claims they would previously have been able to take only to the High Court, crowding out claims from lower earners.

This is the high price of justice done on the cheap: a greater risk of miscarriages of justice, victims waiting years for verdicts, employees with no effective recourse for unlawful treatment at work. And all this is before enforcing the planned cuts factored in to this week’s budget. It shows why Healey’s task is so gargantuan over the next few years: the savings he has already baked in to his spending assumptions are going to be incredibly painful to deliver.

Independence and Integrity

Of course Sir Iain Duncan Smith received no answer worthy of the name:

British citizens Ryan Cornelius and his partner have now been detained for 18—nearly 19—years, without due process, by the United Arab Emirates. The reality is that the UAE supports a huge amount of terrorism in Sudan, where it is responsible for huge loss of life. To make matters worse, it has nominated Lana Nusseibeh of the UAE to be UN Secretary-General. Apart from demanding the release of Ryan Cornelius and his partner, will the hon. Gentleman condemn the UAE for its brutal involvement in Sudan, and block its nominee for Secretary-General, who should never be allowed to take over the UN?

As Human Rights Watch reports:

Lana Zaki Nusseibeh, a long-serving UAE diplomat and foreign affairs official, has an extensive record of denying and whitewashing the country’s rights abuses in Sudan and Yemen, Human Rights Watch said today. On October 21, 2026, the UAE formally nominated Nusseibeh to be the new United Nations secretary-general.

“For years, Lana Nusseibeh has used her position to vehemently deny and divert attention from the UAE’s war crimes in Yemen and support for the abusive Rapid Support Forces in Sudan,” said Bruno Stagno Ugarte, chief advocacy officer at Human Rights Watch. “Her disinformation about the UAE’s rights record, particularly her dismissal of the UN’s own reports documenting the UAE’s links to the RSF, has seriously undermined justice and accountability for the victims.”

Nusseibeh has repeatedly denied that the UAE provides military support to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan, while refusing to address clear evidence to the contrary. The RSF, engaged in a conflict with the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), is responsible for widespread war crimes and crimes against humanity, including as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing in the Darfur region. The United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on Sudan concluded that their assault on the North Darfur capital of El Fasher “bore the hallmarks of genocide.”

In September 2024, Nusseibeh said in a letter to the editor of The Economist that, “[T]he UAE is not providing weapons or any other support to the Rapid Support Forces or any of the warring parties in Sudan.” The letter followed the publication of the first UN Panel of Experts on Sudan’s report, which included conclusions of “credible allegations” that the UAE was providing military support to the RSF through Chad. A UAE government letter from December 2023 in the report annex claims that flights from the UAE to Chad transported humanitarian assistance to Sudanese civilians. The letter is unsigned but bears the letterhead of the Permanent Mission of the UAE to the UN in New York. Nusseibeh was the head of the UAE’s mission from 2013 until April 2024.

In April 2024, in response to accusations from the government of Sudan that the UAE was providing the RSF with military, logistical, and political support, Nusseibeh said in a statement that the “claims were baseless” and affirmed the UAE’s categorical rejection “of the false allegations.” In July 2024, asked by CNN whether the UAE was arming the RSF, Nusseibeh replied: “No, those allegations are categorically untrue. The UAE, as it has done in countless places around the world when there is a humanitarian crisis, has projected humanitarian aid in as quickly as possible and then scaled that way.”

In November 2025, as a minister of state, Nusseibeh took part in an Emirati “lobbying blitz” with key European Parliament members that said that the UAE was “playing a constructive role in Sudan” in the lead up to a vote on a resolution condemning atrocities in Sudan, according to Politico. The European Parliament passed the resolution without mention of the UAE’s role in the conflict. Several parliamentary sources told Euronews that Nusseibeh “personally lobbied MEPs [members of the European Parliament] in Strasbourg to influence the content of the resolution.”

In a subsequent resolution adopted in July 2026, the European Parliament called out the UAE’s role in support of the RSF and requested sanctions on a UAE company involved in the hiring and transfer of mercenaries to the group.

A May 2026 Human Rights Watch report found that Colombian private military contractors, apparently hired by a UAE-based company, transited through UAE military bases before being deployed to Sudan to support and fight alongside the RSF, notably during the forces’ takeover of El Fasher, during which the RSF committed multiple massacres, widespread sexual violence, and a massive abduction-for-ransom racket. The findings provide further evidence that the UAE has been assisting or otherwise substantially contributing to the RSF’s capacity to commit war crimes.

In August, the Fact-Finding Mission on Sudan released a report echoing these findings, concluding “that individuals and entities operating from, registered in, or linked to the United Arab Emirates played a significant role in networks involved in the recruitment, financing, transportation and deployment of foreign military contractors and the provision of military-related support benefiting the Rapid Support Forces.” The mission noted “several sources” indicating the presence of Colombian fighters in and around El Fasher before, during, and after its takeover.

Human Rights Watch has also documented the RSF using military equipment—Serbian-made shells equipping an attack drone—that had first been sold to benefit the UAE armed forces.

On October 27, during an interactive dialogue with UN member states and civil society organizations, Nusseibeh was asked about her denials of findings by the Panel of Experts on Sudan and the Fact-Finding Mission. She did not respond directly to a question about whether she would “continue to reject the findings of the very organization [she] seeks to lead.” Instead, she stated that she had taken a leave of absence from her post as a UAE minister and would refer any questions about the UAE to the UAE government.

As permanent representative to the UN, Nusseibeh repeatedly defended the UAE as complying with international law during its intervention in Yemen while dismissing evidence of widely documented abuses. Beginning in March 2015, the UAE played a prominent role in a coalition of countries that conducted military operations in Yemen, including by committing over 30 fighter jets to carry out airstrikes, providing naval ships to enforce the coalition’s maritime blockade, and supporting abusive local forces.

In 2016, Human Rights Watch documented 58 unlawful Saudi/UAE-coalition airstrikes, killing nearly 800 civilians and hitting homes, markets, hospitals, schools, businesses, and mosques, and the coalition's use of cluster munitions.

In August 2016 and May 2018, Nusseibeh issued statements defending UAE actions in Yemen, claiming that the UAE “takes its own responsibility for upholding international humanitarian law and for protecting civilians very seriously.” The 2018 statement was made a few months before the UAE ordered humanitarian organizations in the coastal city of Hodeida to evacuate despite the immense humanitarian needs, while the Saudi/UAE-led coalition sought to take control of the city from the Houthis.

In 2021, the UAE, alongside Saudi Arabia, successfully led a lobbying campaign to end the mandate of the Group of Eminent Experts, an international, impartial, and independent body the Human Rights Council had established to report on rights violations and abuses in Yemen.

“Lana Nusseibeh has spent over a decade in roles acting for the UAE government and repeatedly whitewashing their abusive role in Yemen and Sudan, presenting Abu Dhabi as a humanitarian actor while dismissing or obscuring mounting evidence of its role in fueling abuses,” Stagno Ugarte said. “Having dismissed and undermined the findings of the UN’s own reports, UN member states should be asking tough questions about Nusseibeh’s willingness to defend the independence and integrity of the UN and its investigative mechanisms, including those exposing UAE abuses, at a time when these institutions are under attack.”