1 In giving evidence to the Chilcot inquiry in London in November 2009, Greenstock noted: “I regarded our invasion of Iraq—our participation in the military action against Iraq in March 2003—as legal but of questionable legitimacy, in that it didn’t have the democratically observable backing of a great majority of member states, or even perhaps of a majority of people inside the UK. So there was a failure to establish legitimacy, although I think we successfully established legality in the Security Council in the United Nations . . . .” His view of the law was not, of course, widely shared in the United Kingdom.

2 A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility: Report of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, UN Doc. A/59/565 (2004), available at http://www.un.org/secureworld.

3 Id., para. 204 (emphasis added).

4 Id., para. 190.

5 Id., paras. 204, 205.

6 Reference must of course be made here to Thomas Franck’s The Power of Legitimacy Among Nations with its essentially procedural criteria of determinacy, symbolic validation, coherence, and adherence to a system of validating rules. For a discussion of European constitutionalist views, see, for example, Manias Kumm, The Legitimacy of International Law: A Constitutionalist Framework of Analysis, 15 Eur. J. Int’l L. 907 (2004).

7 The draft report was discussed at meetings in the United States, Italy, and Japan, with further consultations with some Latin American and African practitioners and scholars.

8 In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All, Report of the Secretary- General, UN Doc. A/59/2005 (2005), available at http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/ N05/270/78/PDF/N0527078.pdf.

9 Richard, Falk, Legality and Legitimacy: The Quest for Principled Flexibility and Restraint, 31 Rev. Int’l Stud. 33, 50 (Supp. 2005). That volume, as a whole, is devoted to a useful discussion of force and legitimacy.Google Scholar