From Humanitarian Intervention to the Responsibility to Protect

Abstract

Since the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, states have traditionally claimed exclusive jurisdiction over their citizens and have been averse to any external criticism of how they treat their nationals as undue interference in their internal affairs. However, that has been altered by the structure of the modern world of interdependence which has raised the level of international concerns with human rights. The international community is developing more and more intrusive norms and mechanisms for monitoring and protecting human rights within the territory of states. The doctrine of humanitarian intervention is probably the oldest of such doctrines. This doctrine did not have a precise meaning in the writings of early jurists and for a very long time, its scope and content remained unclear. Early state practice of humanitarian intervention was based on ‘religious solidarity’ and it was only in the nineteenth century that it began to acquire a specific and technical meaning. Yet, its legal validity before and after the UN Charter came into force remains controversial. In this chapter, I briefly track the origin and debates in the different stages of the normative evolution of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention and relevant international law norms that impact the doctrine. The purpose is to set out the scope and trajectory of the development of humanitarian intervention as a broad context within which to explore the legal validity of the AU–ECOWAS regional military intervention legal regimes under international law.