A leading international lawyer has ruled out the prospect of Tony Blair going before the international criminal court after the long-awaited Chilcot report into the Iraq war is published.
Geoffrey Robertson, QC, a former United Nations appeal judge and author of Crimes Against Humanity, said the prosecution of the former prime minister as a war criminal was “a legal impossibility”.
In an article for the Guardian, Robertson writes: “Both Jeremy Corbyn and Alex Salmond have already hinted that their response to Chilcot will be a wish to put Blair in the dock.”
He added: “This hypothetical, however engaging for television, is a legal impossibility. We need to concentrate on how the law should be changed to ensure that future leaders who wage wars of aggression can be brought to account.”
Anti-war activists, including prominent politicians, have said the report into the 2003 invasion and its aftermath will be a whitewash if it fails to declare Blair’s involvement illegal, opening the way for the case to go to the ICC in the Hague.
But the chances of this happening are fast receding. Sir John Chilcot, whose inquiry began in 2009 and will be published on Wednesday, did not have any lawyers on his panel, making it less likely he would rule on the legality of the war.
Anti-war activists are planning a rally at Westminster to coincide with the release of the report.
Kate Hudson, the spokeswoman for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, said: “It comes down to a principle: where individuals, no matter how lofty, are found to be responsible for crimes, they should face the full force of the law. No one is exempt from justice.”
Salmond, the former Scottish National party leader, has said he will press for Blair’s impeachment. Corbyn, who is due to speak after the report is published on Wednesday, has previously said Blair should face charges of war crimes if the evidence suggests he broke international law.
But it is understood the Labour leader, who has spent the last two weeks fighting an internal party revolt, appears to have decided that international laws are neither strong nor clear enough to make prosecution a reality.
Corbyn was expected on Wednesday to fulfil a promise he made during his leadership campaign to apologise on behalf of Labour for the war. He will speak in the House of Commons after David Cameron, who is scheduled to make a statement shortly after 12.30pm.
The 2.6m-word report was delivered to the prime minister at 11am on Tuesday. No one else has received a report, but Downing Street may have sent copies to other senior ministers.
Corbyn will not receive a copy until 8am on Wednesday, the same time as the families of some of the 179 British soldiers who died in Iraq.
Chilcot is scheduled to make a statement at 11am, lasting 15-20 minutes, and the report will go online as soon as he finishes.
There has been widespread criticism of how long it has taken to publish the report, which cost £10m. It will focus on whether Blair gave an undertaking to the US president, George Bush, in 2002, the year before the invasion, that the UK would take part in it. It will also look at whether he misled the Commons over claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
The report is expected to be critical of the role of MI6, the UK’s overseas intelligence service, for its failings in suggesting Saddam Hussein had WMDs, and of the military.
Philippe Sands QC, a practising barrister and professor of international law, will be looking into whether the report explains why Peter Goldsmith, the attorney general at the time, changed his legal advice, which was against war, after a hastily arranged trip to Washington shortly before the invasion.
“The question is: is there anything to indicate whether pressure was put on Goldsmith to change his legal advice,” Sands said. There was no change in the facts to allow a last-minute change to take place, he added.
“So I want to see how Chilcot deals with that change of advice. If he fails to adequately explain what the reason for that last-minute change was, then it would have critically undermined its credibility and authority.”
The Chilcot inquiry has heard how on 11 February 2003, less than a month before the invasion, Lord Goldsmith met John Bellinger, a legal adviser in the Bush White House. Sands was told that Bellinger later recounted: “We had trouble with your attorney. We got him there eventually.”
Military commanders are expected to face sharp criticism. The head of the army at the time, Sir Mike Jackson, his successor, Gen Sir Richard Dannatt, and the then head of military operations and now chief of the defence staff, Gen Sir Michael Houghton, are all likely to be criticised for not making adequate preparations for the war and its aftermath.
Admiral Lord Boyce, chief of defence staff at the time, may also face criticism, though he expressed misgivings about the invasion and its consequences.
An internal Ministry of Defence report attacks the ministry for being too “complacent” in the run-up to the invasion.
