Humanitarian intervention
Humanitarian intervention refers to the actions taken by a country or group of countries to address severe human rights abuses within another nation, typically involving military force but sometimes including economic sanctions or other non-military measures. This practice raises significant debates in international law, primarily due to its tension with the principle of national sovereignty, which asserts a nation's right to govern its internal matters without outside interference. The United Nations (UN) Charter outlines the legal framework for the use of force, emphasizing that member states should refrain from such actions in domestic affairs, leading many legal experts to view humanitarian interventions as illegal.
However, Chapter VII of the UN Charter allows the Security Council to authorize force in response to threats to peace, which some argue can encompass severe human rights violations. Notable examples of humanitarian interventions include the 1992-1993 US-led action in Somalia, NATO’s bombings during the Bosnian War in 1995, and the 2011 intervention in Libya. Critics of these interventions often contend that such actions are more about national interests than genuine humanitarian concerns, pointing to instances where significant crises have been ignored. The concept of "responsibility to protect" (R2P) emerged in 2005, asserting that when a state fails to protect its citizens from atrocities, the international community has the obligation to intervene, emphasizing the need to prioritize human rights over state sovereignty.
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Humanitarian intervention
A humanitarian intervention occurs when a country or group of countries intervene in the internal affairs of another country, without that country’s permission, to halt large-scale human-rights abuses. Typically, it refers to military intervention, but occasionally, the term is used to refer to economic sanctions or other nonforceful interventions. Although humanitarian interventions have been undertaken many times, they remain a highly controversial topic in international law, as the concept of humanitarian intervention conflicts with the fundamental principle of national sovereignty, a nation’s right to govern its own internal affairs without outside interference.
Overview
A key source of contemporary international law on the use of force is the United Nations (UN) Charter, which states that “members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” In particular, according to the charter, no international action is to be taken with regard to “matters essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” For many international law experts, this clearly makes humanitarian intervention illegal.
Others, however, argue for a looser interpretation of the charter’s language. Chapter VII of the charter empowers the UN Security Council to authorize the use of force to resolve “any threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression,” which some experts say includes war crimes or mass human-rights abuses within one country.
The UN Security Council itself has authorized a number of international military actions on humanitarian grounds. Examples include the US-led intervention in Somalia from 1992 to 1993, intended to create a safe area for the delivery of humanitarian aid to the war-torn country; the 1995 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombing of Bosnian Serb forces engaged in the mass killing of civilians during the Bosnian War; and the 2011 multilateral intervention to protect civilians during the Libyan civil war.
In other cases, states have acted militarily against other states on humanitarian grounds without prior UN approval, such as the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo when that region was fighting for independence from Yugoslavia. Thus, international relations experts sometimes distinguish between “authorized” and “unauthorized” humanitarian interventions, referring to whether the action received prior approval from the UN Security Council.
Critics of humanitarian intervention say that the term is typically just a pretext that nations use to justify interventions that actually have more self-interested goals. For example, critics of the Western intervention in Libya point out that Libya is a large oil exporter, and the nations that intervened were mainly interested in protecting an important source of oil, while much larger humanitarian disasters, such as the 1994 Rwandan genocide, are routinely ignored because powerful nations have nothing to gain by intervening.
Related to humanitarian intervention is the doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” first advanced by the United Nations in 2005. Responsibility to protect, or R2P, asserts that all states have a responsibility to protect their people from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. If a state fails in that responsibility, the international community has a responsibility to step in—using a range of tools, including, as a last resort, force—and protect the people of that state, according to R2P. Thus, like humanitarian intervention, R2P establishes limits to national sovereignty; the main difference between the two is that R2P is meant to shift the emphasis from the interests of states to the interests of people and their human rights.
Bibliography
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Bricmont, Jean. Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War. Monthly Review, 2006.
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United Nations Charter. United Nations, www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter. Accessed 29 Mar. 2024.
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“Humanitarian Intervention?” Global Policy Forum. Global Policy Forum, n.d. Web. 7 Oct. 2013.
Hurd, Ian. “Is Humanitarian Intervention Legal? The Rule of Law in an Incoherent World.” Ethics and International Affairs 25.3 (2011): 293–313. Print.
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