Today’s decision to make the issuing of arrest warrants of suspected war criminals subject to the approval of the Attorney General is a constitutional, legal and political outrage. It is a constitutional violation of the fundamental doctrine of the separation of powers since the Attorney General is not an independent Law Officer, but a Cabinet member with a high political profile (as shown by the recent interference in the SFO prosecution of BAE for corruption) and a political figure subject to Prime Ministerial pressure (as was seen in the ‘persuasion’ of the former Attorny General, Peter Goldsmith, to change his mind about the legality of the Iraq war). It is a legal outrage because decisions to take proceedings against those alleged to have committed very grave offences under the Geneva Conventions Act of 1957 should be exclusively a matter for the courts. It is a political outrage that the UK Government has shown itself more concerned to protect Israeli leaders against the application of universal jurisdiction in any country in respect of genocide, torture and war crimes rather than to uphold the international rule of law against those who have perpetrated such heinous crimes, in this case the killing of 1,400 defenceless civilians in the Gaza bloodletting. And the eagerness of Gordon Brown and David Miliband to apologise to the Israelis and to change British law at their behest is cringing to behold.

Although the duty of the British Government to take action against perpetrators of the most serious offences under the Geneva Conventions is unequivocal, it has proved wholly unwilling to do so. When Pinochet was arrested in the UK in 1999, Jack Straw was only too anxious to bundle the perpetrator of the 1973 massacres back to Chile on the excuse that he was unable to stand trial because he was dementing, a condition from which he recovered almost immediately on returning home. In the current Livni case, the Goldstone report into the atrocities committed in the Gaza war provided ample prima facie evidence for the questioning of a key leader of Kadima which was responsible for the three-week onslaught.
It hasn’t happened (apart from the fact that Livni had already cancelled her visit beforehand) for several reasons. Both Gordon Brown and the Foreign Office have always had a deep prejudice in favour of Israel rather than a balanced view towards the Middle East conflict. The UK authorities never regarded the war crimes conventions as applying to themselves or their allies, only to rogue states or those opposing Western interests. And maybe the Iraq inquiry has reawakened fears that it might be used in some quarters to seek prosecution of British leaders. But whatever the precise motive, today’s decision to put the Attorney General as a political agent in charge of the issuing of arrest warrants is a further encroachment of the Executive into other separate jurisdictions – including the civil service and the media as well as the courts – which should be robustly resisted.

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