Bounties for War Criminals: We Should Not 'Move On' from Mass Murder

The only question that counts is the one that the Chilcot inquiry
won't address: was the war with Iraq illegal? If the answer is yes,
everything changes. The war is no longer a political matter, but a
criminal one, and those who commissioned it should be committed for
trial for what the Nuremberg tribunal called "the supreme international
crime": the crime of aggression.

But there's a problem with
official inquiries in the United Kingdom: the government appoints their
members and sets their terms of reference. It's the equivalent of a
criminal suspect being allowed to choose what the charges should be,
who should judge his case and who should sit on the jury. As a senior judge told the Guardian in November:
"Looking into the legality of the war is the last thing the government
wants. And actually, it's the last thing the opposition wants either
because they voted for the war. There simply is not the political
pressure to explore the question of legality - they have not asked
because they don't want the answer."

Others have explored it, however. Two weeks ago a Dutch inquiry,
led by a former supreme court judge, found that the invasion had "no
sound mandate in international law". Last month Lord Steyn, a former
law lord, said that "in the absence of a second UN resolution authorising invasion, it was illegal". In November Lord Bingham, the former lord chief justice, stated that, without the blessing of the UN, the Iraq war was "a serious violation of international law and the rule of law".

Under
the United Nations charter, two conditions must be met before a war can
legally be waged. The parties to a dispute must first "seek a solution
by negotiation" (article 33).
They can take up arms without an explicit mandate from the UN security
council only "if an armed attack occurs against [them]" (article 51).
Neither of these conditions applied. The US and UK governments rejected
Iraq's attempts to negotiate. At one point the US state department even
announced that it would "go into thwart mode" to prevent the Iraqis
from resuming talks on weapons inspection (all references are on my website). Iraq had launched no armed attack against either nation.

We also know that the UK government was aware that the war it intended to launch was illegal. In March 2002, the Cabinet Office explained
that "a legal justification for invasion would be needed. Subject to
law officers' advice, none currently exists." In July 2002, Lord
Goldsmith, the attorney general, told the prime minister that there
were only "three possible legal bases" for launching a war -
"self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC [security council]
authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this
case." Bush and Blair later failed to obtain security council
authorisation.

As the resignation letter on the eve of the war from Elizabeth Wilmshurst,
then deputy legal adviser to the Foreign Office, revealed, her office
had "consistently" advised that an invasion would be unlawful without
a new UN resolution. She explained that "an unlawful use of force on
such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression". Both Wilmshurst and
her former boss, Sir Michael Wood, will testify before the Chilcot
inquiry tomorrow. Expect fireworks.

Without legal justification,
the war with Iraq was an act of mass murder: those who died were
unlawfully killed by the people who commissioned it. Crimes of
aggression (also known as crimes against peace) are defined by the
Nuremberg principles as "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of
a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties".
They have been recognised in international law since 1945. The Rome
statute, which established the international criminal court (ICC) and
which was ratified by Blair's government in 2001, provides for the
court to "exercise jurisdiction over the crime of aggression", once it
has decided how the crime should be defined and prosecuted.

There
are two problems. The first is that neither the government nor the
opposition has any interest in pursuing these crimes, for the obvious
reason that in doing so they would expose themselves to prosecution.
The second is that the required legal mechanisms don't yet exist. The
governments that ratified the Rome statute have been filibustering
furiously to delay the point at which the crime can be prosecuted by
the ICC: after eight years of discussions, the necessary provision
still has not been adopted.

Some countries, mostly in eastern
Europe and central Asia, have incorporated the crime of aggression into
their own laws, though it is not yet clear which of them would be
willing to try a foreign national for acts committed abroad. In the UK,
where it remains illegal to wear an offensive T-shirt, you cannot yet
be prosecuted for mass murder commissioned overseas.

All those
who believe in justice should campaign for their governments to stop
messing about and allow the international criminal court to start
prosecuting the crime of aggression. We should also press for its
adoption into national law. But I believe that the people of this
nation, who re-elected a government that had launched an illegal war,
have a duty to do more than that. We must show that we have not, as
Blair requested, "moved on" from Iraq, that we are not prepared to
allow his crime to remain unpunished, or to allow future leaders to
believe that they can safely repeat it.

But how? As I found when I tried to apprehend John Bolton,
one of the architects of the war in George Bush's government, at the
Hay festival in 2008, and as Peter Tatchell found when he tried to
detain Robert Mugabe, nothing focuses attention on these issues more
than an attempted citizen's arrest. In October I mooted the idea of a
bounty to which the public could contribute, payable to anyone who
tried to arrest Tony Blair if he became president of the European
Union. He didn't of course, but I asked those who had pledged money
whether we should go ahead anyway. The response was overwhelmingly
positive.

So today I am launching a website - www.arrestblair.org
- whose purpose is to raise money as a reward for people attempting a
peaceful citizen's arrest of the former prime minister. I have put up
the first PS100, and I encourage you to match it. Anyone meeting the
rules I've laid down will be entitled to one quarter of the total pot:
the bounties will remain available until Blair faces a court of law.
The higher the reward, the greater the number of people who are
likely to try.

At this stage the arrests will be largely
symbolic, though they are likely to have great political resonance. But
I hope that as pressure builds up and the crime of aggression is
adopted by the courts, these attempts will help to press governments
to prosecute. There must be no hiding place for those who have
committed crimes against peace. No civilised country can allow mass
murderers to move on.