5 |
Advice on the legal basis for military action, November 2002 to
March 2003
799.
Asked if he
agreed with Sir Michael’s description that the team was in an
advocacy
mode,
Mr Macleod replied:
“Yes … The
decision had already been made in the sense that we knew what
the
Attorney’s
view was. The question was how to help present it in a way that
would be
easy to
present, easy to understand, because … the full advice of 7 March
is a fairly
complex,
dense legal document and you needed something else which brought
out
the key
points which could be used in Parliament and in other
places.”342
800.
Ms Adams told
the Inquiry:
“I think
the understanding of everybody sitting round the table on 16 March
was
not that
the Attorney General was giving legal advice to Parliament through
that
statement
but he was setting out a view of the legal position …. coming back
to the
difference
between the earlier cases, where there had been legal advice from
Law
Officers
saying there is a reasonable case, what had happened on those
occasions
was not
that the Attorney General had gone to Parliament and said ‘This is
lawful
because
there is an overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe’, or ‘Because
there is
a revival’,
it had been the Government Minister in the Foreign Office or the
Ministry
801.
On the
morning of Monday 17 March, preparations for Cabinet later that
day
and
Parliamentary debates the following day were put in
place.
802.
Lord
Goldsmith set out his view of the legal basis for military action
in
a Written
Answer on 17 March 2003.
803.
In
parallel, Mr Straw wrote to the Chairman of the Foreign
Affairs Committee
with a copy
of Lord Goldsmith’s Answer and an FCO paper which addressed
the
legal
background.
804.
Mr Straw
also wrote to Parliamentary colleagues drawing their attention
to
the
documents being published and the statements issued at the Azores
Summit
the
previous day.
805.
Lord Goldsmith
replied on the morning of Monday 17 March to a Written
Question
tabled by
Baroness Ramsey of Cartvale (Labour):
“To ask Her
Majesty’s Government what is the Attorney General’s view of the
legal
basis for
the use of force against Iraq.”344
342
Public
hearing, 30 June 2010, page 65.
343
Public
hearing, 30 June 2010, pages 51-52.
344
House of
Lords, Official
Report, 17 March
2003, column 2WA.
143