Memorandum from Greenpeace UK
1. Greenpeace UK is an independent non-profit-making
body, whose principal activities are campaigning to prevent environmental
harm and for peace through disarmament. Greenpeace UK has 220,000
supporters.
2. Worldwide, Greenpeace has roughly 2.9
million supporters in over 100 countries. It is also accredited
with consultative status with the United Nations Economic and
Social Council (including the United Nations General Assembly)
and has accreditation status with the United Nations Conference
on Environment and Development.
3. Greenpeace opposed the war against Iraq
because the war would have devastating human and environmental
consequences, because war is an ineffective way to deal with the
problem of weapons of mass destruction and because we agreed with
Nelson Mandela going to war was "a decision that is motivated
by George W Bush's desire to please the arms and oil industries
of the USA".
4. Greenpeace UK actively campaigned against
the war in Iraq. In its view the proposed war was unjustified
and, without specific UNSC authorisation (which Greenpeace did
not consider to be provided by the UNSC Resolutions up to and
including 1441), illegal. Greenpeace's campaign activities included
direct action, taking part in mass demonstrations and lobbying
members of parliament.
5. Greenpeace is very concerned that MPs
and the public were given inaccurate or incomplete information
by the government—including an edited memo summarising the
advice of the Attorney General—in order to support the case
for war.
6. Central to the government's case for
war was the assertion that the government knew that Iraq possessed
weapons of mass destruction. For example, the Prime Minister in
debate on 18 March 2003 said, "We are asked now seriously
to accept that in the last few years—contrary to all history,
contrary to all intelligence—Saddam decided unilaterally
to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably
absurd."
7. The Prime Minister's assertion that Iraq
continued to possess weapons of mass destruction was not a conclusion
which is supported by the weapons inspectors' report of 7 March
2003. The Prime Minister said, in the same debate, that "any
fair observer does not really dispute that Iraq is in breach of
resolution 1441 or that it implies action in such circumstances".
It is instructive to compare this characterisation of the position
with that of Switzerland whose permanent representative to the
UN gave a statement in New York on 11 March 2003, stating: "Switzerland
notes that UNMOVIC and the IAEA do not have, at this moment, conclusive
evidence indicating that Iraq possesses or is continuing to produce
weapons of mass destruction."
8. It follows that the assertion that Saddam
did have weapons of mass destruction was not a conclusion drawn
by the weapons inspectors in the process laid down by 1441. Nor
was the Security Council ever given an opportunity to debate whether
Iraq was in breach of UNSC resolutions, how serious the breach
was, and whether there were alternatives to war. The position
that Iraq was in breach of Security Council resolutions and that
the breach—possession of weapons of mass destruction and
the willingness to use them—was so serious that military
action was necessary and urgent was a conclusion reached unilaterally
by the UK government, not by the UN.
9. Before parliament voted on 18 March 2003,
the bulk of opinion from international lawyers was (and remains)
that the use of force against Iraq, without specific United Nations
Security Council authorisation, would be unlawful. [71]It
is against this weight of opinion that a statement from the Attorney
General was published on 17 March 2003, one day before the Commons
voted on the question of war.
10. The Attorney General's statement is
partial and incomplete. The statement did not attach a copy of
the full legal opinion, nor does it disclose the facts upon which
the Attorney General's conclusion was based. The statement does
not mention and comment upon the weight of expert opinion, including
that of the UN Secretary General, that the unilateral use of force
would be unlawful.
11. The Attorney-General's conclusion that
authority existed for the use of force was, of course, highly
influential in the parliamentary vote and among the public at
large. In Greenpeace's view, it was wrong to present a partial
statement of the Attorney-General's opinion, which gave an incomplete
picture of the legal position on using force against Iraq. As
Lord Goodhart said in the House of Lords: "We now have the
summary of the advice given to the Government by the noble and
learned Lord the Attorney-General. We welcome the fact of that
disclosure, although we should have liked to see much more detail
of what must have been a lengthy opinion dealing with the complex
arguments involved in the case and showing possible qualifications
and reservations. All we have seen is the baldly stated summary.
We also regret that the noble and learned Attorney-General has
not given us the opportunity to ask questions and to hear his
answers."
12. However, even the Attorney-General's
opinion did not support the assertion that the government made,
and continued to make, that resolution 1441 implied the right
to use force against Iraq. [72]
13. The Attorney-General's opinion is plainly
based on the legal argument that the authority to use force under
resolution 678 could revive "because (Iraq) has not fully
complied with its obligation to disarm under that resolution."
As mentioned above, the determination that Iraq had failed to
disarm and that it possessed weapons of mass destruction could
not have come from the conclusions of the UN weapons inspectors
under resolution 1441. If Iraq had, in fact, disarmed and did
not possess weapons of mass destruction then the Attorney-General's
opinion is fatally flawed and its conclusion is invalid.
14. It is therefore vital to know the factual
basis upon which the Attorney-General's advice was given.
CONCLUSIONS
We urge the committee to extend its inquiry
into whether the information given to parliament was "accurate
and complete" to the information upon which this vital piece
of advice was based.
We urge the Committee to ask to see the full
legal opinion of the Attorney General, in order to determine whether
the summary given of that opinion was partial and incomplete.
We urge the Committee to ask for the information
upon which the Attorney-General's determination that Iraq was
in serious breach of its obligation to disarm was based.
Greenpeace UK
June 2003
71 For example, 16 eminent international lawyers said
so in a letter published in the Guardian on 6 March in which they
stated that "there is no justification under international
law for the use of military force against Iraq." 43 international
lawyers had written to the Australian press in similar terms,
saying "the initiation of a war against Iraq by the self-styled
"coalition of the willing" would be a fundamental violation
of international law." Barristers from Matrix Chambers, Rabinder
Singh QC and Charlotte Kilroy had advised CND and others that
there was no authority for the use of force against Iraq, in a
series of publicly available opinions. Mark Littman, QC, agreed
that, in the absence of a new Security Council Resolution authorising
war in unambiguous terms, an attack on Iraq would be unlawful.
Lord Archer of Sandwell, a former solicitor general, was quoted
as saying "In the absence of a further resolution it would
be flagrantly unlawful to take military action." In its resolution
of 31 January on the situation in Iraq, the European Parliament
opposed any unilateral military action and considered that a preventive
strike would violate international law and the United Nations
Charter. And on 10 March 2003 Kofi Annan, the secretary general
of the UN said: "If the US and others were to go outside
the Security Council and take unilateral action they would not
be in conformity with the Charter." Back
72
For example, the Foreign Office in its policy on Iraq issued
on 31 March 2003 said this: "In November, the UN Security
Council unanimously sent the Iraq regime an uncompromising message:
co-operate fully with weapons inspectors or face disarmament by
force." This statement was untrue and misleading. UN resolution
1441 was passed because the members of the Security Council were
under the unambiguous impression that a breach did not imply automatic
force. Back
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