The Netherlands: Will PM Balkenende step down after Dutch panel rules Iraq war was illegal?

Dutch PM Jan Peter Balkenende

The war in Iraq had "no basis in international law", a Dutch inquiry found today, in the first ever independent legal assessment of the decision to invade. In a series of damning findings, a seven-member panel in the Netherlands concluded that the war, which was supported by the Dutch government following intelligence from Britain and the US, had not been justified in law. "The Dutch government lent its political support to a war whose purpose was not consistent with Dutch government policy," the inquiry in the Hague concluded. "The military action had no sound mandate in international law." In a further twist, it emerged that the UK government refused to disclose a key document requested by the Dutch panel.

Editorial note EU-Digest: It is hoped that the US Administration under the leadership of President Barrack Obama and the British Government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown will also have the courage to install independent commissions to review the legality of the Iraq war during the Bush Administration. And consequently, if these inquires show no evidence is found that the Iraq war was justified, take the appropriate legal action against those responsible for withholding accurate information on the actual situation in Iraq before the invasion, and the death of thousands of innocent lives in Iraq and the numerous military casualties of this war. It has been suggested that the only proper action for Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, who took the decision to take the Netherlands into the war in Iraq, would be to step down.

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