The Osterley Times: Goldsmith broke rules on disclosing Iraq war advice

Friday, May 26, 2006

Goldsmith broke rules on disclosing Iraq war advice

The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, has been found to have breached his own government's freedom of information laws when he refused to make public his reasoning as to why the war against Iraq was legal without the requirement of a second UN resolution.

In an enforcement notice issued against the Attorney General, the information commissioner, Richard Thomas, said: "When Government chooses to publish a statement which was intended to be seen as a clear statement of the legal position the Government was adopting, there is a public interest in knowing the extent to which it had been based on firm and confident analysis and advice, or was at least consistent with what had gone before."

As a consequence of this ruling, the Attorney General has agreed to release some information about the chain of events during the 10 days before Britain went to war with Iraq.

Goldsmith is famous in the UK for having said that the war with Iraq would be illegal without a second UN resolution and then famously changing his mind when the second resolution failed to materialise, causing resignations within his department, the most notable being Elizabeth Wilmshurst, a legal adviser at the Foreign Office, who said the war would be a "crime of aggression".

It is, at the moment, unclear as to the significance of this victory for the Independent newspaper as the ruling does not demand that he publish minutes, e-mails and memos, that would show exactly what political or other pressures were in play between 7 March, when he gave his confidential advice to the Cabinet, and 17 March.

But Clare Short, the former international development secretary who resigned from the Cabinet after war broke out, said last night the release underlined the case for a high-level judicial inquiry. She said: "We know from the Hutton inquiry how the e-mails show a lot of the true events. If we had them, they would show the pressure put on the Attorney. We have to have a high-level judicial or parliamentary inquiry."

Dominic Grieve, the shadow Attorney General, said the document showed that "the Prime Minister misled the Attorney General in the same way that he misled Parliament".