Corbyn: Blair Could Stand Trial for War Crimes in 'Illegal' Iraq War

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair should face a war crimes trial if evidence comes to light that indicates he was complicit in decisions which violated international law in the "illegal" Iraq war in 2003, Labour leadership front-runner Jeremy Corbyn has said.

In an interview with BBC's Newsnight programme on Tuesday night, Corbyn was asked if Blair should face war crimes charges. "If he has committed a war crime, yes. Everybody who has committed a war crime should be," he replied.

"It was an illegal war. I am confident about that. Indeed Kofi Annan [UN secretary general at the time of the war] confirmed it was an illegal war and therefore [Tony Blair] has to explain to that," Corbyn added. "Is he going to be tried for it? I don't know. Could he be tried for it? Possibly."

He called on Blair to "confess" some of the decisions he had made prior to the conflict, which ultimately took the lives of more than one million people, according to an estimate by British polling group Opinion Research Business (ORB).

In the interview, Corbyn also spoke of the "consequences" Blair must face once the Chilcot Report, an investigation into the Iraq War, which began in July 2009 but has yet to be published as those who are criticised in the report are afforded time to respond to the inquiry's findings, is released. The report will make public the content of conversations held between Blair and former U.S. President George W. Bush about the decision to invade Iraq.

"The Chilcot report is going to come out sometime. I hope it comes out soon. I think there are some decisions Tony Blair has got to confess or tell us what actually happened. What happened in Crawford, Texas, in 2002 in his private meetings with George [W] Bush," Corbyn said.

"Why has the Chilcot report still not come out because apparently there is still debate about the release of information on one side or the other of the Atlantic. At that point Tony Blair and the others that have made the decisions are then going to have to deal with the consequences of it."

The veteran leftist politician, 66, staunchly rejected the Iraq war and believes it to have been an "illegal" conflict which is still having ramifications for the Middle East as well as Europe.

"We went into a war that was catastrophic, that was illegal, that cost us a lot of money, that lost a lot of lives," he said. "The consequences are still played out with migrant deaths in the Mediterranean, refugees all over the region."

Last month, Blair launched a scathing attack on Corbyn, telling his supporters that if their heart was with him to "get a transplant" as voting for him would be "like going back to Star Trek or something...back to the old days."

A YouGov poll for the Times newspaper published on 22 July showed that the leftist politician would finish above leadership rival Andy Burnham by six points in the final round of voting in the 12 September poll. The other two candidates for the Labour leadership, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall, trailed by an even larger margin.