Chilcot: lawyers expose illegality of Iraq war

Two former law officers at the Foreign Office lit a fuse under the Iraq Inquiry yesterday, and the powder trail leads directly to Tony Blair, who appears on Friday. His day in court before Sir John Chilcot's panel and the world's media is not likely to be comfortable given the charges implicit in the testimony of Sir Michael Wood and Elizabeth Wilmshurst.

Sir Michael (above left), the senior Foreign Office lawyer in the run-up to the Iraq war, stated that he told Foreign Secretary Jack Straw that there was no case in international law for a war to change the regime in Baghdad. He also said that there was no case on the grounds of self-defence – one of the prime reasons that the UN authorises a member nation to fight – as there was no imminent threat of attack by Saddam's forces on the UK or its vital interests.

He gave written advice to Jack Straw that the UN Security Council resolution 1441, passed in November 2002 to set up a new weapons inspection programme in Iraq, could not be used to authorise military action in itself. It needed a second clear resolution by the Security Council to make an attack on Iraq in 2003 lawful.

He said Straw "chose to ignore this advice" and told his legal team that "international law was vague" and open to interpretation anyway. Sir Michael Wood told the Chilcot Inquiry that quite the opposite was the case: that the law is particularly sharp and unequivocal on the legal case for going to war.

Elizabeth Wilmshurst (above right), Sir Michael's colleague who worked specifically on the Iraq crisis, was asked if the Foreign Office legal team had difficulty because their boss, Jack Straw, was a trained lawyer. "But he's not an international lawyer", she told the Chilcot Inquiry in what is possibly the most devastating witness appearance to date.

Elizabeth Wilmshurst resigned the night British forces invaded Iraq because she thought the war was illegal. She said she believed "our troops were entitled to be able to operate without the controversy of questions over the legality about what they're doing".
 
She said she disagreed strongly with the opinion given finally to Tony Blair by his Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, just a few days before the attack – namely, that the PM could decide whether Iraq was in breach of earlier UN resolutions to disarm, and therefore he could order British troops to war – and need not refer the matter back to the UN Security Council.

She was dismayed at the way Lord Goldsmith's initial view that the UK government needed to go back to the UN was sent across to 10 Downing Street in draft form. The implication was that it was up to Tony Blair to amend it in favour of him being able to decide that he should go to war without further involving the UN.

Wilmshurst said "the process followed was lamentable" and bereft "of the transparency with which we go about evolving legal advice". It shouldn't have been left to the Attorney General alone to decide at the last minute whether the country should go to war, she said.

Hers has been the strongest voice of criticism of the conduct of the Blair government in taking the country to war in Iraq so far. In a cool firm voice she spoke in simple brief sentences.

In fact it was the committee that appeared at times flustered and rattled. The military historian Sir Lawrence Freedman repeatedly asked her to undermine the authority of the UN Security Council, which she steadfastly refused to do. In his two concluding questions, the chairman, Sir John Chilcot, even invited her to question the role and status of a government law officer like herself.

It was as if the committee sensed that Elizabeth Wilmshurst and Sir Michael Wood had laid down the questions they cannot dodge putting to Tony Blair on Friday: above all, why did he set the country on such a disastrous and ill-thought war of choice when so many well qualified legal experts knew it was against international law and said so at the time?

The sense of the storm gathering was compounded yesterday when it was announced that the documents from the post-mortem on Dr David Kelly, the government scientist, are to be made available to doctors after all. The Hutton enquiry into his alleged suicide in the Iraq row in 2003 had ordered that the government documents be kept secret for 30 years and certain medical records for 70. Some doctors have never accepted the verdict of suicide. ·