Headline of the Article
The Weaponization of Human Rights: A Double Standard in Western Foreign Policy?
Author: Ceren Kale
University: Ankara University – Korean Language and Literature Graduate of 2024
To the Point
A profound and damaging inconsistency marks the foreign policy of Western nations, where the powerful language of human rights is applied with conspicuous selectivity. The swift, unified, and morally unequivocal condemnation of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine stands in stark and irreconcilable contrast to the hesitant and often contradictory response to Israel’s military campaigns in Gaza, a dynamic that senior political analysts like Marwan Bishara (2023) have argued reveals a perceived ‘hierarchy of human life’ in Western foreign policy. While Russian actions are immediately labeled as war crimes, nearly identical actions by a strategic ally are persistently framed through the lens of a “right to self-defense”—a legal justification that prominent scholars like Richard Falk (2021) have argued is highly questionable under the laws of occupation. This selective application of justice is further visible in the West’s approach to international courts; the same International Criminal Court (ICC) celebrated for indicting Russian leaders was condemned when it sought warrants for Israeli officials. This move, which legal experts like Jennifer Trahan (2024) identify as a direct threat to the court’s independence, demonstrates how the machinery of international justice is being calibrated to serve geopolitical interests. Such actions fuel accusations that human rights are not a moral compass but a flexible tool of foreign policy, eroding Western credibility and fostering a dangerous global environment where accountability is contingent on political alignment.
Abstract
By concentrating on the sharply different ways human rights principles are applied in modern Western foreign policy, this paper offers a critical analysis of the enduring charge of a double standard, which becomes evident when comparing the profoundly different reactions to the crises in Ukraine and Gaza. It examines how “moral diplomacy”—the stated practice of aligning foreign policy with ethical standards and the promotion of democracy—appears to be inconsistently, and strategically, applied. This selective application fuels critiques that human rights have been instrumentalized or “weaponized” to advance geopolitical interests rather than universal values. The article undertakes a comparative analysis of the political rhetoric, media framing, economic sanctions, military support, and diplomatic actions within international legal bodies, such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court (ICC). The paper highlights the West’s robust support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and its pursuit of justice. It then contrasts this with the conditional and frequently impeded process for achieving Palestinian accountability to argue that this inconsistency is profoundly damaging. This selective approach not only erodes the legitimacy of the international human rights framework but also exacerbates global political polarization, deepens the trust deficit between Western nations and the Global South, and ultimately weakens the global consensus required to prevent mass atrocities.
Use of Legal Jargon
The charge of a double standard is most clearly substantiated by the inconsistent application and interpretation of international law. The legal disparity is evident in the deployment of core legal concepts:
- State Sovereignty and the Crime of Aggression: In the case of Ukraine, Western powers immediately invoked the foundational principles of State Sovereignty and Territorial Integrity as enshrined in the UN Charter (North Atlantic Treaty Organization, February,2022). There was a broad international consensus that Russia’s invasion constituted a flagrant crime of aggression. The legal scholar Antonio Cassese (2008) explained that this is regarded as a supreme international crime, falling under the category of jus cogens—a peremptory norm in international law so fundamental that no state is permitted to violate it. In contrast, while the Palestinian territories are recognized under international law as occupied, the framework of sovereignty is rarely afforded the same weight in Western political discourse concerning Gaza.
- The Right to Self-Defense: Western leaders almost always justify Israel’s military actions by invoking its ‘right to self-defense’ as outlined in Article 51 of the UN Charter. However, prominent legal scholars like Richard Falk (2021) have repeatedly questioned whether this right can be invoked by an occupying power against a population under its occupation. This nuanced legal debate is largely absent from the political statements of key Western governments, which present the right as absolute and unqualified.
- International Humanitarian Law (IHL): The Fourth Geneva Convention, as interpreted by the International Committee of the Red Cross (1949), explicitly requires an occupying power to provide for the well-being of .the principle of civilian protection, in addition to forbidding any policy of collective retribution. Yet, Western governments have been hesitant to formally accuse Israel of breaching these tenets, even amidst actions like cutting off water, food, and electricity to Gaza’s entire population. In contrast, similar Russian actions in Ukraine were immediately condemned as grave breaches of IHL.
- Proportionality and Distinction: The IHL principles of proportionality and distinction are central to the laws of armed conflict. Reports from respected organizations like Amnesty International (2024) have provided extensive evidence of potentially disproportionate attacks in Gaza. However, official Western reactions often accept state assurances that every effort was made to avoid civilian casualties, a level of deference not extended to Russian claims.
- The International Criminal Court (ICC) and Complementarity: The West enthusiastically supported the ICC’s investigation into Russian officials. The previously strong Western support for the ICC disintegrated rapidly following the Prosecutor’s announcement that arrest warrants were being sought for Israeli officials. As international law expert Kevin Jon Heller (2023) critiques, the principle of complementarity—that the ICC can only act when national judiciaries are unwilling or unable to genuinely investigate—was invoked to defend Israel’s legal system, yet this argument is rarely accepted for adversarial nations.
The Proof
The evidence of a double standard is not merely anecdotal but is substantiated by a pattern of divergent political, financial, rhetorical, and legal actions.
Discrepancies in Sanctions and Aid
The financial response to Russia’s 2022 invasion was unprecedented. As detailed by the Council on Foreign Relations (2024) in its sanctions tracker, the United States and European Union, with G7 allies, imposed a comprehensive sanctions regime targeting Russia’s core economic sectors and freezing hundreds of billions in sovereign assets. This was coupled with a monumental flow of military and financial aid to Ukraine. In stark contrast, during periods of intense Israeli military operations in Gaza, U.S. military aid to Israel has continued unabated. As Human Rights Watch (2024) highlights in its World Report, this creates a jarring inconsistency, with the U.S. providing arms to an ally amidst actions that have led to devastating civilian casualties while condemning similar actions elsewhere.
Rhetorical and Diplomatic Biases
The language employed by Western officials and amplified by allied media starkly differs between the two conflicts. This rhetorical strategy creates what Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman (1988) famously termed an “empathy gap” in their foundational work, Manufacturing Consent. Ukrainian forces are consistently lauded as “defenders,” while any form of Palestinian armed resistance is almost exclusively labeled as “terrorism,” a designation that decontextualizes the violence. This extends to the highest levels of diplomacy. An analysis of United Nations (2024) records shows the U.S. has used its Security Council veto power dozens of times to shield Israel from critical resolutions. Between 2022 and 2024, at least three resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza were vetoed by the U.S., while it simultaneously championed resolutions condemning Russia at the General Assembly.
Undermining International Legal Bodies
The West’s relationship with international courts has become a primary exhibit of its double standard. The ICC’s 2023 arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin was hailed by President Biden as “justified.” However, when ICC prosecutor Karim Khan announced in 2024 that he was seeking arrest warrants for top Israeli officials alongside Hamas leaders, the response was one of outrage. In a formal statement from the U.S. Department of State (2024), Secretary Antony Blinken called the decision “shameful.” Legal scholar Jennifer Trahan (2024), writing for Just Security, analyzed this threat to sanction international judges as a blatant attempt to subordinate international justice to political interests.
Case Laws
While international courts do not rely on binding precedent, their rulings establish critical legal interpretations and expose political biases in their reception.
- Prosecutor v. Vladimir Putin (International Criminal Court, 2023): The ICC’s issuance of an arrest warrant for the Russian president for the war crime of unlawfully deporting Ukrainian children was met with unified praise across the West. It was presented as proof that the “rules-based order” was functional and that no one was above the law. This case serves as the benchmark of what a unified Western response to perceived war crimes looks like: full-throated political support for international legal mechanisms.
- The Situation in the State of Palestine (International Criminal Court, ongoing): The ICC’s jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories has been contested by Israel and its allies for years. The 2024 application for arrest warrants against leaders from both Hamas and Israel for war crimes and crimes against humanity brought the double standard into its sharpest focus. The hostile reaction from Washington and other Western capitals, which questioned the court’s legitimacy in this specific case, stood in direct opposition to their stance on Ukraine, signaling that the legitimacy of the court was conditional on whose actions were being scrutinized.
- Allegations of Genocide under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (South Africa v. Israel) (International Court of Justice, 2024): South Africa’s institution of proceedings at the ICJ represented a landmark legal challenge. The ICJ’s preliminary orders, which found a “plausible” risk of genocide and mandated Israel to prevent genocidal acts, were legally binding. However, the political reaction from the West was notably muted. The U.S. State Department called the allegations “unfounded,” while Germany intervened on Israel’s behalf. This reticence to support the ICJ’s provisional measures contrasted sharply with the West’s enthusiastic embrace of the court when it ruled against Russia in a parallel case brought by Ukraine.
Conclusion
The profoundly different responses to the atrocities in Ukraine and the devastation in Gaza lay bare a deep-seated and increasingly unsustainable contradiction at the heart of Western foreign policy. The proclaimed commitment to a “rules-based international order” now appears to be conditional, its foundational principles of justice and human rights applied with a political pragmatism that follows geopolitical fault lines rather than universal legal and moral obligations. This selective indignation has not gone unnoticed. It has dangerously eroded the West’s moral credibility and fueled a profound sense of alienation across a skeptical Global South, where leaders and populations see not a consistent application of values, but a self-serving hierarchy of victimhood. As commentators in outlets like the EU Reporter (2025) have noted, this perception of double standards is no longer a fringe critique but a mainstream driver of international relations, making it nearly impossible to build the global coalitions necessary to confront shared challenges.
The damage inflicted by this inconsistency extends deep into the institutional architecture of global governance. When powerful Western nations champion the International Criminal Court for investigating adversaries but threaten to sanction its officials for investigating allies, the court’s legitimacy is fundamentally compromised. As legal scholar Jennifer Trahan (2024) argues, such actions subordinate the rule of law to raw political power, signaling to the world that international justice is a tool to be wielded against enemies, not a standard to which all must be held. This instrumentalization of human rights—treating them not as an end in themselves but as a means to a geopolitical end—is precisely the dynamic that critical academics like Stephen Hopgood (2013) have identified as symptomatic of the “endtimes” of the universal human rights project, where the concept is stripped of its moral power and reduced to the language of statecraft.
By allowing this double standard to become policy, Western nations risk more than just their reputation; they risk creating a legitimacy vacuum where international law itself is seen as a farce. This emboldens autocrats and violators everywhere, who can now point to the West’s hypocrisy to deflect from their own crimes. To reverse this damage and restore faith in the global human rights regime, a fundamental and politically difficult shift is required: from a foreign policy of convenient outrage to one of consistent principle. This demands more than rhetoric; it requires the courage to apply pressure on friends and foes alike, to accept the rulings of international courts even when they are politically inconvenient, and to affirm, through action, that the inherent dignity and rights of a child in Gaza are valued as dearly as those of a child in Ukraine. Without this fundamental consistency, the entire architecture of international justice risks crumbling not from external attack, but from the weight of its own internal contradictions.
FAQ
Q1. What is the core accusation of a “double standard” in Western foreign policy regarding human rights?
A: The core accusation is that Western nations, particularly the United States and its key European allies, apply human rights principles and international law inconsistently. They are accused of vigorously condemning and punishing human rights abuses when committed by adversarial nations (e.g., Russia in Ukraine) but downplaying, justifying, or actively shielding allies who commit similar or worse violations (e.g., Israel in Gaza).
Q2. How is international law applied differently in the cases of Ukraine and Gaza?
A: In Ukraine, there is a strong, consistent focus on Russia’s violation of sovereignty, the crime of aggression, and war crimes, coupled with robust political and financial support for investigations by the ICC and ICJ. In the case of Gaza, the legal discourse from Western governments is often narrowly focused on Israel’s “right to self-defense,” with far less official emphasis on its binding obligations as an occupying power under the Geneva Conventions. Furthermore, investigations by the same international courts targeting Israeli actions have been met with political hostility and threats from key Western actors.
Q3. What is “moral diplomacy” and how does it relate to this issue?
A: Moral diplomacy is a foreign policy approach advocating support for countries that share one’s moral and democratic values. The critique is that this principle is applied selectively. It is used to justify strong alliances and interventions that serve strategic interests, while the undemocratic practices or human rights abuses of allied nations are often overlooked. This exposes it as a potential justification for geopolitical positioning rather than a genuine commitment to morality.
Q4. How does this alleged double standard affect the international order?
A: It severely erodes the credibility of Western nations as impartial defenders of human rights. It also undermines the foundational legal principle that international law should apply universally to all states, regardless of their power or alliances. This fosters deep resentment and distrust, particularly from countries in the Global South, making it more difficult to build the global consensus needed to address pressing crises and may embolden states to commit violations with impunity, believing accountability is determined by their geopolitical relationships.
