Respect for law lay behind its immediate action in July to scrap the Rwanda deportation plan. It was again the basis of the more recent agreement reached with Mauritius over the Chagos Islands. The review of arms licensing to Israel, he added, came from the same approach. It was a decision based on “law, not politics”. International law, Hermer said, was seamlessly part of the rule of law, too. It was “not simply some kind of optional add-on, with which states can pick or choose whether to comply”.