The UN is playing a game of legal semantics while the world burns. The submission to the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights tries to claim that human rights still apply during war. This is a pathetic attempt to apply paperwork to a massacre.

The treaty promises rights to food and health and water. These things vanish the moment a drone enters the airspace. There is no right to life when the infrastructure of survival is pulverized.

The features of this legal delusion are plain.

• The belief that treaties restrain munitions.
• The myth of protected social rights in a scorched earth policy.
• The failure of legal frameworks to account for total destruction.