Putting Tony Blair in the dock is a fantasy – he broke no law | Geoffrey Robertson

If we are to prevent world leaders from waging wars of aggression without just cause, we must first make sure there’s a law against it

Both Jeremy Corbyn and Alex Salmond have already hinted that their response to Chilcot will be a wish to put Tony Blair in the dock – a spectacle long advocated by Desmond Tutu, George Monbiot and others. This hypothetical, however engaging, is a legal impossibility. Instead, 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.

There is little doubt that the US/UK invasion of the sovereign state of Iraq in 2003 was an unlawful breach of the UN charter, which permits such force only in self-defence, ie when there is an imminent threat of an armed attack, or (less certainly in 2003) a case for humanitarian intervention. But a breach of the charter does not mean that those who lead it are guilty of a war crime – which must, like any other crime, be both clearly defined and justiciable by an available court.

Related: The phone call from George Bush that told Tony Blair he’d failed on Iraq | Sarah Helm

Blairites still argue that the invasion was an exercise in humanitarian intervention – it was nothing of the sort

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