THE decision by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to drop a probe into alleged war crimes by British troops in Iraq comes at a key moment for the anti-imperialist left.

Human Rights Day, which commemorates the United Nations’ adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) on December 10 1948, is being used to relaunch the doctrine of “humanitarian intervention,” with shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy attending the launch of Dr Harry Pitts and Professor Paul Thompson’s pamphlet A Progressive Foreign Policy for New Times.

Given that 2020 has been dominated by a pandemic that has claimed more than a million-and-a-half lives, Human Rights Day could have been marked by campaigning on UDHR Article 25, which sets out the human right to healthcare: denied in countries like the United States and threatened here by corporate profiteers.