NATO’s Humanitarian Intervention in Kosovo: Making or Breaking International Law?

Abstract

SummaryNATO’s seventy-nine-day campaign of air strikes against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia has sparked a wide-ranging debate as to the legality of such military action. NATO has consistently justified its intervention on humanitarian grounds, thus clearly resorting to the controversial doctrine of “humanitarian intervention.” The author argues that while a conventional analysis of the purported right of unilateral humanitarian intervention under international law and of NATO’s acts on the Kosovo issue might lead some individuals to the conclusion that such acts were illegal (or, at best, of dubious legality), this conclusion fails to take into account the fact that state actors, particularly when acting in concert, tend to influence the content of international law itself. The author suggests that the true significance of NATO’s forcible intervention in the Kosovo crisis is that it sets a clear precedent that may well crystallize an emergent norm of customary international law permitting forcible intervention by one or more states against another on humanitarian grounds, even without prior UN Security Council authorization. While such a norm may acquire universal status, it is also possible, in light of the regional concentration of the primary actors involved as well as of important objections from some quarters as to its legality, that it will acquire (at least in the first instance) a local or regional character, perhaps confined to the Euro-Atlantic area.