![Retired UK senior judge says legal justifications for Iraq war a stretch](https://www.jurist.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/jurist-white-text.png)
[JURIST] Lord Steyn, a recently retired UK senior judge, has said that the UK government had to scrape the bottom of the legal barrel in order to justify its invasion of Iraq. Lord Steyn also agreed with the conclusion of the outgoing chairman of rights group Justice [advocacy website] that none of the government's grounds for intervention were justified. At a Justice debate Tuesday evening, Steyn said that the idea that believing that the Iraq war did not make London and the rest of the world a more dangerous place especially in light of the recent London bombings [JURIST news archive] would be to believe a fairy tale. Earlier this year, the UK government came under pressure [JURIST report] over the details of legal advice [PDF text; JURIST report] it received prior to the 2003 Iraq war. British Attorney General Lord Goldsmith was reported to have warned that the invasion could be ruled illegal [JURIST report], though Goldsmith denied [JURIST reports] that his parliamentary answer [text] on the legality of the invasion had been drawn up in the Prime Minister's office, rather than his own. The Telegraph has more.