GALLOWAY: TONY BLAIR’S HIGH COURT VICTORY SHOWS THE LAW IS AN ASS He thinks Blair should have faced justice over Iraq War.

  He thinks Blair should have faced justice over Iraq War.

by George Galloway

If there really is no law against launching “aggressive war” in England then the law is an ass. The decision by two High Court judges that Tony Blair cannot be prosecuted for the war in Iraq gives immunity and in perpetuity to any two-bit hustler who gets his or her hands on state-power in Britain and lays waste the lives of others and their own country’s vital interests.

Michael Mansfield QC ( may God preserve him) had argued that the international law outlawing the making of aggressive war ipso facto applied to Britain. After all we are frequently found lecturing others of the extra-territoriality of law in the modern era. Not least since the Chicago doctrine adumbrated by Tony Blair himself in relation to the Kosovo Question.

Serbian law was perfectly clear on the right of the state to put down an armed separatist challenge to the existence of their state. When the UN Security Council declined the opportunity to interfere in Serbian affairs the way seemed clear.

No says the Chicago doctrine. There are laws immutable and timeless which supersede national sovereignty and even – a novel concept- that members of the Security Council who’d failed to persuade their UNSC colleagues of their case could willy nilly launch a war in support of the very proposals they’d failed to persuade the Council of.

Now in the Blair Question the situation is reversed. Now international law banning “aggressive war” cannot apply in England because the British parliament has not explicitly said it should. That the unacceptability of “aggressive war” might be thought axiomatic in a country like ours, a veritable self-appointed international policeman, has not troubled the judges overly.

But there is no need for such a parliamentary decision nor was there any need for the recent adoption of new international law on the matter.

Britain already did set its legal face against “aggressive war” and was at the cutting edge of doing so.

In the Nuremberg Trials Britain prosecuted the surviving beasts of German Fascism for precisely the crime of launching “aggressive war”. Even though what the genocidal dictator of Germany did was perfectly “legal” under German law, even though there was no international legal definition of “aggressive war” Britain rightly tried the Nazi beasts and hanged a great number of them.

From that moment onwards the de jure inadmissibility of such wars was established axiomatically in the British legal system. Unless we now consider the Nuremberg Trials to have been a kangaroo court acting as a Lynch-mob which I for one do not.

Tony Blair’s war on Iraq was as Chilcot established a war not of last resort with no sound basis and which undermined the United Nations which under British law we are legally bound to underpin.

Its consequences are heading towards the level of gravity of the Hitlerite crimes. More than a million people have died and that number is still rising daily. A fanatic mutation of Islamic interpretation has been spawned which now spans the globe.

Sovereign states have been invaded occupied and destroyed. International law has been shredded. Torture in secret prisons of victims illegally kidnapped and ferried to their fates on the torture tables of tyranny by, amongst others, us. As a result of Tony Blair’s war the youngest of our children will likely not enjoy a moment of peace and security in their whole lives.

The political systems of the aggressor countries have been gravely undermined and the credibility of their governors bankrupted perhaps for ever.

It’s quite a charge sheet. 

But not one we are told that can ever be tested in a British Court . If that’s justice, I’m a banana.

http://www.westmonster.com/galloway-tony-blairs-high-court-victory-shows-the-law-is-an-ass

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