Attempts to stop people including writer Sally Rooney from expressing support for Palestinians facing genocide have been likened by Mary Robinson to the demonisation of opponents of South African apartheid.
Speaking before an event on international law held at the Museum of Literature on Dublin’s St Stephen’s Green, the former president said that over her long career “this is the most difficult time [and] the challenges are more serious than they’ve ever been”.
She said the decision by British publisher Faber not to sell Rooney’s books in the UK over concerns the author’s support for Palestine Action could expose her to legal jeopardy was “a very worrying constraint and repression”.
Robinson, a former UN commissioner for human rights, said the current conflict had been “so complicated by the need to address and combat anti-Semitism, and that is important, but it’s also now constraining genuinely legitimate protest on the Palestinian side”.
Before the event examining the pressures on international law and global accountability, she said “you have to allow people to protest when they see that a genocide is unfolding, that horrible things are happening in the West Bank”.
On a recent fact-finding mission there, with other members of the Elders, a global group of leaders that she chaired until two years ago, Robinson said she had been shocked by “Israeli flags asserting a kind of Jewish supremacy”.
“It is now official policy,” she told The Irish Times. “There’s no doubt that [Binyamin] Netanyahu has completely bought into the far right. And hopefully that is what will be displaced if there is a change of government.”
She said it was “‘hard to foretell” the result of the upcoming Israeli general election, but said it was “clear that Israel as a whole has moved to the right, perhaps understandably, after the terrible attacks of October 7th”.
She said a new government, “if it isn’t led by [Netanyahu], probably won’t shift too dramatically, but [it] can change an overall approach and that’s, I think, the best we could hope for”.
The Dublin event, titled What’s Law Got to Do With It? Power, Accountability and the Future of the International Rule of Law, was organised by Irish Rule of Law International with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Robinson said the rule of international law had to be defended “because it’s under attack. It’s under threat, but it’s also very resilient. And just because key leaders, who should know better, haven’t upheld the rule of law doesn’t undermine [it].”
She highlighted the undermining of previous norms by social media, which “divides people into extremes and the loudest voices can be persuasive. And the loudest voices are telling us it’s elitist somehow to uphold all the rules, that we need to have freedom, whatever that is.”
“And it’s appallingly stupid, but it seems to try to influence people and people are anxious at the moment because of the confusing messages and that is deliberate,” Robinson said.
In her address to about 200 delegates including a visiting delegation of Ukrainian judges and justice officials, she said “authoritarian political forces are working hard to undermine” international law.
“We live in an age where populism is in the ascendancy, driven by a combination of economic insecurity, falling trust in politics and institutions, a wave of disinformation and hate speech on social media and a pervasive feeling that leaders do not listen to ordinary citizens,” Robinson said.
“In such a climate, it is all too easy for loud and powerful voices to peddle superficially attractive notions of ‘taking back control’, whether on immigration, trade or labour and social rights, and to dismiss legal safeguards and counter-arguments as elitist, technocratic and at odds with the will of the people.”
She suggested that international law had “a communications problem” and said it was “critical to articulate the fact that international law isn’t an abstract set of treaties debated by lawyers and diplomats. It is the architecture behind many aspects of our daily life.”
She cited the phones and other digital communications devices used daily, and the fact that “a plane can fly over borders safely, or that food and goods are traded freely and young people are able to work between countries” as well as “vaccines approved and shared internationally, and the co-ordinated response to global health emergencies” and said they were all the “result of decades of international legal agreements”.
She noted that “when international law is ignored, we also feel it directly” through “higher energy and food prices because conflicts disrupt supplies, from Ukraine to the Strait of Hormuz”.
She said that although the consequences of “deliberate attempts to weaken the international rule of law are felt by all of us”, they are felt most strongly by the most vulnerable including “the widows and orphans of Khan Younis, the victims of air raids and drone strikes in Kyiv and the survivors of the most horrendous forms of sexual violence in Khartoum”.
She pointed out that if “we are to rebuild and re-energise support for the international rule of law at a national level, we need to also consider how well we are doing to secure equality and protection closer to home”.
She said Northern Ireland was facing rising challenges to progress on women’s rights, with “more than 31,500 domestic abuse incidents recorded by police in the year to March 2026, while Women’s Aid reported that 30 women had been murdered since 2020.
“At a time when far-right, anti-migrant agitators here and across Europe are trying to frame their thuggery and intimidation as ‘protecting our women’, it is even more important that people, governments, legal bodies, police services and the judiciary step up their efforts against gender-based violence and not leave any vacuum that can be exploited. Human rights and gender equality cannot continue to be weaponised. Leaders must support the protection of civic space and human dignity.”