You appear to be approaching this as with hobbes leviathan. There is some lovely shining "right" out there and everything else is "wrong".
"Entitled"? International laws only apply if a country chooses to abide by them. Governments can therefore choose to leave whenever they want. That is the point of having a government.
Which international laws should the UK be abiding? All of them? The ones the UK has signed up to? Ones that have passed the UN? Or just the ones that are "right"?
Ethics are equally based on the country and on the time. Things that are now thought to be ethical would not have been decades ago, and I'm sure that things we now do will be thought to be unethical in the future.
The Civil Service Code can also be rewritten by government - perhaps to specify that Civil Servant follow UK law as opposing to pick and choose what they feel like. Those that disagree can resign.
The UK government shouldn't be doing this for a very simple reason: the Civilised world functions on a series of beliefs and one important one is the rule of law. If we all pretend laws exist and need to be obeyed, then from that almost everything else is derived - ownership of ideas and objects and the ability to trade. The more countries ride roughshod over them, sooner or later it is worse for all. One hundred years ago, a gentleman's agreement was sufficient for the UK government to send millions of men off to get killed because a chap doesn't break his word with other chaps. (and yes, massive perceived self interest) And although many might have thought the UK mad for having such a Code it did mean countries generally knew where they stood.
Boris appears to be cheerfully courting anarchy with the view that laws don't matter when inconvenient. Even Blair got his top pet lawyer to change his mind and pretend he had legal backing for attacking Iraq - what he did was illegal but he pretended it was following the law. Generally one can break the law and not get caught (as was the case with Cummings) but that doesn't make him innocent, just not charged with a crime.Even he didn't just turn around and say "yeah, I just don't really think
I need to bother with that law since it was inconvenient".
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