"International law hasn’t disappeared” - Philippa Webb on the UN, Maduro and a world under strain
“It is a moment of rupture.” That much Philippa Webb concedes immediately. But the Professor of Public International Law at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government is firm about what rupture does not mean. “International law hasn’t disappeared,” she says. “It is a scaffolding that underpins many activities and transactions every day.”
That distinction matters. The mood around international politics can make it feel as if the rules no longer exist. Professor Webb’s argument is more precise, and more unsettling: the rules are still there, but some of the most powerful states are acting in ways that test them openly.
Professor Webb was speaking at SOAS University of London months after US forces seized Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from a military compound in Caracas and after, as she put it in her lecture, the story had shifted again with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei killed in US-Israeli air strikes, the consequences of that attempted regime change still unfolding in real time.
The widespread consensus is that the capture and prosecution of Nicolás Maduro has serious international legal problems.
Together, the two cases formed the backdrop to her argument: not that international law has vanished, but that some of its most important limits are being openly tested and supporters of the international legal order have to stand firm.
Maduro, immunity and the meaning of sovereignty
In her lecture at SOAS, Professor Webb returned to the image of Nicolás Maduro “handcuffed and blindfolded on a US naval ship”, treating it not simply as a dramatic political event but as a legal one.
“The widespread consensus is that the capture and prosecution of Nicolás Maduro has serious international legal problems.” It was, she says, a breach of sovereignty and independence.
Her lecture sets out why. The forcible seizure of a sitting head of state, she argues, raises questions of sovereignty, inviolability and immunity. International law is not designed to make those protections optional.
On the contrary, the office of head of state carries “extensive immunity, inviolability and other special rules”, because it represents more than a private person. It represents the state itself.
Iran, Trump and the return of catastrophic language
But Professor Webb’s visit to SOAS was also about something broader than one case. In her lecture, she notes how quickly the story shifted from Venezuela to Iran and “the consequences of that attempted regime change are still unfolding in real time.”
Asked about Donald Trump’s threat over Iran, she calls the language “very destabilising”. But she refuses to look only at the statement itself.
“We can’t look at this in isolation. We have to look at the response.” For her, that response matters: criticism from different regions and leaders, including Pope Leo, she describes as showing real bravery in refusing to let those statements pass unchallenged.
What worries her as much as the rhetoric itself is what follows: institutions becoming paralysed, and a multilateral system losing legitimacy because it cannot impose meaningful restraint on the most powerful states.
Does the UN still matter?
This is where the question becomes bigger than Maduro or Iran. If powerful states can act like this, what is left of the UN and of international law itself?
Professor Webb does not pretend the multilateral system is functioning as it should. But she does not give up on it either. “If it didn’t exist, we would have to invent it,” she says of the UN. The problem, in her view, is not that cooperation no longer matters, but that waiting for all 193 states to move together is no longer enough.
Her answer is a shift in emphasis: not away from international law, but towards smaller groupings that are more likely to act. Geographic, thematic and even public-private coalitions, she suggests, may offer a more realistic path forward than relying only on full multilateral consensus. In other words, if multilateralism is stalling, minilateralism may be where action still becomes possible.
Her lecture lands in a similar place. “We are not in a legal vacuum where ‘might is right’,” she says. Whether the route is war, assassination, capture, prosecution or sanctions, “each route to regime change is beset by legal obstacles.”
What does this mean for students?
Professor Webb is not offering students reassurance. She is asking something harder of them. If the old multilateral model is stalling, if institutions are paralysed, and if powerful states can no longer be relied on to uphold the rules they once championed, then the response cannot just be nostalgia for a system that worked better on paper than in practice.
Instead, she argues for “creative thinking, lateral thinking” and for learning from the strategic methods authoritarian leaders use so well: “the tools of communication and technology, the tools of surprise, the tools of building coalitions”. Not to copy their politics, but to use those tools for very different ends: defending international law, raising pressure to comply, and finding ways to act when the traditional routes are blocked.
There is a second challenge in that too. Stop waiting for the biggest powers to lead. Professor Webb is blunt that others will need to step forward: middle powers, regional powers, smaller alliances, new coalitions.
And then there is her final instinct: not resignation, but momentum. “We should convert despair to pursue new paths.”
The lecture was jointly organised by CISD/SOAS, UNA Westminster, and the Bar Council of England and Wales
