Britain called Israel’s occupation unlawful. It should say the same of Western Sahara.
Andrea Maria Pelliconi, 2 October 2026 6 mins read
Ed Miliband’s statement to the Commons on 8 September 2026 was an act of legal and moral clarity. The Foreign Secretary announced that the Government now regards Israel’s occupation of the West Bank as unlawful, adopting the conclusion of the International Court of Justice’s 2024 advisory opinion amid Israel’s explicit intention to extend permanent sovereignty through an expansionist settlement agenda. Miliband was right to say that Britain shall not be a bystander to the destruction of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and insist that the law does not bend to the convenience of the powerful. But the Government’s abidance by international law should be measured by its coherence. Fourteen months before that statement, the same Labour Government – under Keir Starmer – took the opposite side on an identical question.
In June 2025 the UK abandoned five decades of neutrality on Western Sahara. In its joint communiqué with Rabat, it declared Morocco’s 2007 autonomy proposal “the most credible, viable and pragmatic basis” for resolving the dispute. The plan offers the Saharawi people autonomy within the Moroccan state and forecloses independence altogether. The UK’s endorsement of the plan is part of a broader diplomatic current, led by Washington, pushing to convert the Moroccan proposal into a settled international position. The message that the UK’s endorsement of the Moroccan plan sends to occupying powers worldwide is that occupation, once entrenched deeply enough and for long enough, will in time be rewarded with recognition. This is the opposite of what the Foreign Secretary affirms for the West Bank.
There is a clear parallel between the situations of Palestine and Western Sahara, which has been a listed Non-Self-Governing Territory since 1963. In 1975 the ICJ found that Morocco had no sovereignty over the territory and the Sahrawi people held the right to self-determination. Morocco then spent the following decades entrenching its control over roughly four-fifths of the territory through settlements, financial inducement, and large-scale infrastructures and development projects, while simultaneously displacing the Saharawi to nearby countries, until they became a minority in their own homeland. In 1991, the UN deployed MINURSO to organise a referendum on self-determination which was never held, obstructed above all by disputes over who may vote, with Morocco seeking to enrol its own settlers and to exclude displaced Saharawi. Western Sahara has faced prolonged occupation, settlement and demographic change, the establishment of irreversible facts on the ground, and the drive to turn occupation into permanent annexation – just as in the West Bank.
The two cases’ resemblance means the law that governs both is, or should be, the same. The 2024 ICJ opinion not only declared Israel’s occupation unlawful but also reaffirmed the general duty of states not to recognise a situation created by a serious breach of peremptory norms, nor to render aid or assistance in maintaining it, and to cooperate in bringing it to an end. That duty applies to all situations of denial of self-determination, the unlawful acquisition of territory, and the entrenchment of settlement in occupied land. Morocco’s presence in Western Sahara engages each of those wrongs. A government that treats the duty of non-recognition as binding in the West Bank cannot treat it as optional in Western Sahara.
The Court of Justice of the European Union has understood this. In its Front Polisario judgments, culminating in the ruling of 4 October 2024, it held that EU-Morocco trade agreements could not lawfully extend to Western Sahara absent the consent of the Sahrawi people, including those who have been displaced, and it has been equally clear that the territory is not part of Morocco and has a separate and distinct status. Britain’s June 2025 communiqué moves in the opposite direction to the CJEU as it treats deeper economic engagement as a contribution to the dispute’s resolution rather than as an act that entrenches the very situation international law obliges third states not to recognise.
The latest communiqué on Palestine reaffirmed British support for a two-state solution between Israel and a sovereign, viable Palestinian state, and the Foreign Secretary built his entire statement a few days ago around that objective – as the “North Star” of British policy, in the words of Miliband himself. Self-determination cannot be a right Britain upholds for Palestinians and withholds from the Saharawi. If the UK advocates for a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians, it cannot exclude the possibility of the same outcome for Moroccans and Saharawi by endorsing a plan that only presupposes integration. Autonomy may well be one legitimate option, but it cannot be the only one on the table. The Saharawi are entitled to choose freely either integration with Morocco or independent statehood. A choice narrowed to a single permitted result is not a choice, and it is not what the 1975 opinion or the referendum mandate contemplated.
It might be objected that the two cases are not alike and comparable, because the scale of violence in Palestine is far greater than anything in Western Sahara today, and that this justifies more urgent condemnation of Israel regardless of what the law says in the abstract. The premise is largely true, as the level of ongoing violence in both Gaza and the West Bank is higher, and the ongoing armed conflict between Morocco and the Polisario Front, reignited in 2020 after the collapse of the ceasefire, goes almost entirely unremarked. The fighting takes place outside the occupied territory, around which Morocco has built a military wall to keep outside the displaced Sahrawis and the Polisario Front. This not only shows that Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara is not less serious than the West Bank – if anything, it is more entrenched, which would require stronger responses. In the early years of the occupation Morocco drove the majority of the Saharawi population into exile, killing many in the process, in events that Saharawi describe as ethnic cleansing and genocide; today, only one quarter of Sahrawi lives in Morocco, facing continued oppression and discrimination.
In terms of legal obligations under international law, the wrongful nature of an occupation does not (only) rest on the violence it generates but in the occupation itself, as the ICJ has held in its 2024 advisory opinion. Britain and others shouldn’t have waited for such a tragic escalation in Palestine to take serious action on Israel’s occupation. And Western Sahara demonstrates that an unlawful occupation left unaddressed for fifty years never resolves itself; to the contrary, it was precisely when states such as the United States began to recognise Moroccan sovereignty over the occupied territory, in exchange for normalisation with Israel in 2020, that the armed conflict resumed, leading to more violence.
Ed Miliband correctly told the House that Britain loses credibility and influence on the world stage when it fails to uphold the values it professes. If Britain holds itself bound by the ICJ’s 2024 opinion on the West Bank, it should hold itself bound by the ICJ’s 1975 opinion on Western Sahara. It should reflect the duty of non-recognition in all the economic relationships it chooses, rather than expanding trade, finance, and infrastructure into another occupied territory. And it should withdraw its June 2025 endorsement of a plan with a foreclosed outcome, support self-determination for Africa’s oldest incomplete decolonisation, and let the Saharawi decide their own future.