SIR – In his Source column (Worcester News, March 22), Tom Edwards wrote of Councillor Mike Charles that “he considers” the war in Iraq to be illegal.

A lot of people consider the war to be illegal because it is.

For example, when she resigned at the start of the war, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, a Foreign Office lawyer, wrote that “an unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression”, one of the “crimes against peace” for which Nazis were hanged at Nuremberg.

As the American prosecutor at Nuremberg said, starting a war for any reason other than self-defence is “not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”.

There is no doubt that the war in Iraq – which has led to possibly one million deaths and four million refugees – is illegal.

NEIL LAURENSON

Worcester Green Party