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by Mahi Ramakrishnan
Press TV, Kuala Lumpur
November 22, 2011
from
PressTV Website
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A Malaysian tribunal has found former US
President George W Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair
guilty of committing crimes against humanity during the Iraq war. |
The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal found the former heads of state guilty
after a four-day hearing.
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A seven-member panel chaired by former Malaysian
Federal Court judge Abdul Kadir Sulaiman presided over the trial.
The five panel tribunal unanimously decided that the former US and British
leaders had committed crimes against peace and humanity, and also violated
international law when they ordered the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
The prosecutors at the hearing ruled that the invasion of Iraq was a
flagrant abuse of law, and act of aggression which amounted to a mass murder
of the Iraqi people.
�Bush and Blair are found guilty under the
same law that applied to the Nazis after the end of the World War II.
So, they are international (war) criminals guilty of Nuremberg crimes
against peace; and they should be prosecuted by any state in the world
that gets a hold of them.
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We will continue our efforts to bring Bush
and Blair to justice and put them in jail,� Francis Boyle, an
international law expert and prosecutor, told Press TV.
The judges in the verdict said that that the
United States, under the leadership of Bush, forged documents to claim that
Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Bush and Blair were tried in absentia by the
Kuala Lumpur War
Crimes Tribunal at the end of the hearing.
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The participants also demanded that the findings
of the tribunal be made available to members of the Rome Statute and that
the names of the two former officials be entered in the register of war
criminals.
�There is also a recommendation that this
(the findings) be circulated to the states because all states have
universal jurisdiction. Therefore, whenever Bush or Blair appear within
their shores there is an obligation on the international law to commit
these international war criminals through the justice system,� Gurdial
Singh Nijar, a prosecutor, told Press TV.
Lawyers and human rights activists in Malaysia
have described the verdict issued by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal
against Bush and Blair as �a landmark decision.�
They say that they would lobby the
International Criminal Court to charge
the pair for war crimes.
The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal is scheduled to hold a separate hearing
next year on charges of torture linked to the Iraq war against former US
officials including,
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