Portillo on Blair & International Law.....

[Englander]

all apologies for sending you to the Sunday Times,though it is worth it...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-1408531_2,00.html

.....Two court cases in recent days may have sent a chill down Blair’s spine. A judgment from the Court of Appeal in a case brought by relatives of Baha Mousa (who died in British custody in Iraq, allegedly from beatings) held that Britain’s Human Rights Act applies to people detained in a British jail abroad. A side effect of liberating Iraq is that its citizens are free to litigate in any court in the world that will give them a hearing.

.....Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, has said that the Iraq war was illegal. I foresee that at some point an aggrieved Iraqi, whether acting spontaneously or as a pawn of those hostile to the coalition, will use the courts to test the legality of the war and therefore the lawfulness of the killings that it caused. A court might well consider relevant the government’s dossier on WMD, how the attorney-general came to give his advice and what the advice was.

If Blair found himself in such a predicament, he ought to recognise that he helped to nudge international law in that direction. He and Jack Straw were gleeful when for 18 months they detained General Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator. They acted on a warrant obtained in a Spanish court; Pinochet was held under house arrest in Britain for alleged crimes in Chile. The case established that national leaders were not above the law, could not enjoy immunity when they had left office and were at risk from a warrant secured in any jurisdiction in the world and enforced in any other.

When Blair leaves office and embarks on the lecture tours that will pay for his Connaught Square house in London, he should keep a watchful eye out for warrants, perhaps sought by an Iraqi, issued by a French court and served upon him by authorities in Tuscany. It would be a terrible way for him to discover that, after all, rules do apply to him as well.

[non sociopath skin]

1. Hmm. Portillo lectures Bliar on integrity in the Murdoch Press...

... pots and kettles, methinks.

The Skin

[AP]

2. It makes my skin crawl to read the opinoins of the party of Mark Thatcher

on international law.

Has that party no sense of decency?

[Englander]

3. Eh? Well,don't read them.....

And,what do you think about the prospect of Bliar being arrested for his Iraq-related crimes?