"We want to establish regular and impartial procedures to establish whether war crimes have been committed" during the 26-day-old military campaign, said Phil Shiner of the British group Public Interest Lawyers.

Shiner spoke at a news conference where Michael Ratner, president of the US Center for Constitutional Rights, warned that the principle of "victor's justice" was legally unacceptable.

"It is not only Saddam's crimes that have to be examined," Ratner said.

The regime of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein collapsed under a fierce military onslaught unleashed by the United States and Britain.

"We do not know if war crimes have been committed," Ratner said. But he added: "We should examine why so many people could have been killed on one side."

Shiner said the use of cluster bombs and ammunition containing depleted uranium in densely populated areas might breach the Geneva Convention and the UN Charter.

These and other instruments of international humanitarian law insist on discriminating between military targets and civilians, he said.

Roger Normand, executive director of the Committee on Economic and Social Rights in New York, noted that under international law it was also "very clear that the United States has no legal basis to exploit Iraq's oil."

He recalled that the United States itself had reaffirmed this position when it did not allow Israel to extract oil from Sinai in eastern Egypt when it seized the peninsula.

SPACE.WIRE