PRESENTATION OUTLINE
Evolving Legitimacy of Humanitarian Interventions
Article 2 of UN Charter: Use of Force
- Inherent right of self-defence
- Authorization by UN Security Council, acting under Chapter VII powers, in response to international peace and security threat
- 3rd right emerging? Right to humanitarian intervention?
International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS)
Justifying Peacekeeping
- Causal connection between grave violations of human rights and IHL and threats to international peace & security.
- Powers of SC are so unbound that there is nothing to prevent it declaring any situation to be a ‘threat to security'
- UN increasingly regards itself as subject to the positive and negative obligations of international law.
The responsibility to protect (R2P)
A regime can systematically brutalise and oppress its people and there is nothing anyone can do, when dialogue, diplomacy and even sanctions fail, unless it comes within the definition of a humanitarian catastrophe (though the 300,000 remains in mass graves already found in Iraq might be thought by some to be something of a catastrophe). This may be the law, but should it be?
(BLAIR, 2004).
The Protection of Civilians
Open debates on POC have indeed been the only occasions within the formal [Security] Council agenda to reflect on the development of the R2P norm and its practice. Yet the sensitivities around the inclusion of R2P within the protection of civilians’ agenda have increased in recent months. There are concerns that the POC agenda is being needlessly politicized by the introduction of R2P into the Council’s work and resolutions on the protection of civilians, as those who seek to roll back the 2005 endorsement of R2P raise questions about the protection of civilians in the attempt to challenge hard-won consensus reached on both issues.
(GLOBAL CENTRE FOR THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT, 2009).
For all the drawbacks in allowing individual States to act as judge, jury and executioner, in carrying out ‘humanitarian interventions’, most of these at least have clear lines of legal and political accountability by which their actions can be challenged. UN missions by contrast are often responding to the problems they encounter through improvisation in the field, limited resources and in areas of opaque and still largely unexplored law.
Where new thinking is required is not whether international law should be ‘reformed’, to make it easier for States to invade one another, but on how we apply existing principles for a world in which States increasingly act extraterritorially and through transnational actors. No one who has seen a massacre up close would argue with the proposition of international intervention to save lives. But we still need to discuss how we can tame the Leviathan that we wish to create.
