When Principle Meets Practice: Women, Justice and Britain's Role in the World
Over the past few weeks I have spoken in the House of Lords on three subjects that, on the surface, sit in very different parts of foreign policy: a new claims commission for Ukraine, the impact of aid cuts on women and girls, and a bill to close a long-standing gap in how Britain recognises genocide. Underneath, they are the same question asked three ways. Does the UK back its stated commitment to women and international justice with real, sustained follow-through, or does practice keep falling short of the principle?
Ukraine: a mechanism that can work, if we resource it
I welcomed the convention establishing an international claims commission for Ukraine, and the Government's support for its swift ratification, when I spoke on it last month. The scale of the task ahead is immense: the Register of Damage has already received over 150,000 claims, with suggestions the final number could run as high as 10 million. A lasting peace cannot be built on a foundation where the victims of aggression carry its human and economic costs without recognition or redress.
The gendered dimension matters as much as the scale. There are now thousands of documented cases of conflict-related sexual violence alongside the destruction of homes and infrastructure, and for those who have survived it, the process of seeking redress must be confidential, accessible and trauma-informed, with evidential requirements that reflect the realities of war rather than placing an impossible burden on survivors. Ukrainian women's organisations have invaluable knowledge of what that looks like in practice, and I hope they will be consulted directly as the commission's procedures are designed.
What strikes me most, though, is the gap between the parts of this that are funded and the parts that are not. The UK's contribution to the commission's operation is welcome, but the separate compensation fund from which awards would actually be paid has yet to be established. A mechanism for justice is only as credible as the money behind it.
Aid cuts: protecting a budget is not the same as building on it
That same gap runs through the debate on official development assistance cuts and their impact on women and girls, which I also spoke in recently. UK aid spending is falling to its lowest share of national income since 1999, and bilateral programmes, where most of our gender-focused work sits, are being cut by 37%, a reduction the Government's own equalities impact assessment recognises will fall disproportionately on women and girls.
On women, peace and security specifically, an area I have worked on for many years as an adviser to the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, I welcomed the decision to protect central WPS funding at 2025-26 levels. But the planned increase to that programme has itself been cut by 25%, at a time when the Commons International Development Committee has found the Government's commitment to its own national action plan on women, peace and security "appears to be waning." Protecting last year's budget, while welcome, is not the same as building on it.
These are not abstract numbers. The Women's Integrated Sexual Health programme was described by the Government as "relatively protected," yet its delivery partner, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, now faces a 22% funding reduction to a programme that has helped avert over 1,000 maternal deaths. I welcome the commitment that 90% of FCDO bilateral programmes will contribute to gender equality by 2030, and hope women's rights organisations working in fragile and conflict-affected states are consulted as full partners in the new delivery model. The UK has built real credibility on this agenda; sustaining it will take sustained investment, not just sustained language.
The Genocide Determination Bill: closing a two-decade gap
The sharpest example of this gap sits in the Genocide Determination Bill, which had its Second Reading in the Lords on 17 July, 2026. I was glad to speak in support of Lord Alton of Liverpool's bill, the product of a decade of persistence since it was first introduced in 2016.
I grounded my support in Sudan, a crisis I have addressed this House on before. In February this year, the UN's Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan concluded that the Rapid Support Forces' siege and takeover of El Fasher bore the hallmarks of genocide against the Zaghawa and Fur communities, documenting mass executions, enforced disappearances and widespread sexual violence alongside starvation as a coordinated campaign of destruction. Yet, as with Darfur two decades earlier, there is no mechanism in UK law through which survivors can ask our courts to make the determination that successive governments have said should properly rest with judges, not ministers.
That is precisely the gap this Bill closes. It is victim-centred, allowing survivors, or organisations representing them, to bring evidence before our courts. The gap is worth stating plainly: the UK has formally recognised only five instances of genocide since the Convention was adopted in 1948, despite being one of 154 state parties and having acceded to it in 1970. The Joint Committee on Human Rights has identified shortcomings in our domestic framework for accountability on international crimes, and while this Bill will not resolve every one, it gives our courts a defined role in identifying when the threshold of serious risk has been reached. I hope any procedure developed under it will be genuinely accessible to survivors of sexual violence: confidential, trauma-informed, and alive to the fact that the evidential realities of atrocity rarely fit conventional court timelines. This is a practical Bill. It does not ask the Government to abandon its position that determination is a judicial matter; it simply asks that our courts be equipped to do what that position already assumes they should.
The common thread
A claims commission without a compensation fund, a WPS budget held flat while ambition is described as waning, a legal principle with no mechanism to give it effect: three debates, one recurring pattern. This was never really about whether Britain has the right principles, but whether the mechanisms, funding and courts behind them are given what they need to do the job. I will keep pressing the Government on all three, and hope the coming months bring more of the follow-through these issues, and the women at the centre of them, deserve.
