Human Rights, Humanitarian Intervention, and World Politics

Abstract

International law, and the world politics that creates and sustains it, has increasingly manifested a tension between the primacy of state sovereignty and other values that would challenge that primacy.' One of those challenging values is individual human rights. A persistent question is receiving renewed attention at the end of the twentieth century: is the international community entitled to override state sovereignty in the interest of protecting persons? United Nations action concerning Iraqi Kurds during 1991-1992 is but one manifestation of this renewed tension between state sovereignty and human rights. Situations demanding intervention to protect persons present a number of fundamental questions. For human rights violations occurring materially within a territorial state, what principle prevails: state sovereignty, or the international community's interest in protecting human rights? How is the community interest to be manifested, by nonforcible or also forcible measures, and by whom executed, states or international organizations? Which internationally recognized rights, if any, might seem to qualify for international forcible protection? In this essay we focus on what has been traditionally called humanitarian intervention. We examine the legal status of the claimed prerogative of a foreign actor to use force within the territorial jurisdiction of a state, without the consent of the ruling authority, to ameliorate or terminate violations of internationally recognized human rights. This is not a technical legal question, if properly understood. It is a fundamental political question about authority in world politics. In an era of rhetoric about a New World Order, this Gordian knot has taken on renewed importance. Brian Urquhart, an experienced former United