Tony Blairs offence is known by two names in international law: the crime of aggression and a crime against peace. It is defined by the Nuremberg principles as the planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression. This means a war fought for a purpose other than self-defence: in other words outwith articles 33 and 51 of the UN Charter. That the invasion of Iraq falls into this category looks indisputable. Blairs cabinet ministers knew it, and told him so. His attorney general warned that there were just three ways in which it could be legally justified: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UN security council authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Blair tried and failed to obtain the third. His foreign secretary, Jack Straw, told Blair that for the war to be legal, i) there must be an armed attack upon a state or such an attack must be imminent; ii) the use of force must be necessary and other means to reverse/avert the attack must be unavailable; iii) the acts in self-defence must be proportionate and strictly confined to the object of stopping the attack. None of these conditions were met. The Cabinet Office told him: A legal justification for invasion would be needed. Subject to law officers advice, none currently exists. Advertisement Without legal justification, the attack on Iraq was an act of mass murder. It caused the deaths of between 100,000 and a million people, and ranks among the greatest crimes the world has ever seen. That Blair and his ministers still saunter among us, gathering money wherever they go, is a withering indictment of a one-sided system of international justice: a system whose hypocrisies Tutu has exposed. Blairs diminishing band of apologists cling to two desperate justifications. The first is that the war was automatically authorised by a prior UN resolution, 1441. But when it was discussed in the security council, both the American and British ambassadors insisted that 1441 did not authorise the use of force. The UK representative stated that there is no automaticity in this resolution. If there is a further Iraqi breach of its disarmament obligations, the matter will return to the council for discussion as required in paragraph 12. Two months later, in January 2003, the attorney general reminded Blair that resolution 1441 does not authorise the use of military force without a further determination by the security council.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 12:33:53 +0000
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