Security Council's Humanitarian Intervention: Revisiting Somalia and Rwanda

Abstract

Founded in 1945, as the Preamble of the UN Charter indicates, the United Nations tries “to provide peace, security, and justice.” The UN, in one way, tries to achieve this end through humanitarian intervention, meaning the “post hoc rationalization for uses of force otherwise difficult to reconcile with international law.” However, because the word “humanitarian intervention” does not appear in the UN Charter, the UN has agreed upon three principles of humanitarian intervention: uses military force, interferes in the state’s internal affairs, and responds to crises where states’ interests are not directly threatened. But in order to get the green light, the UN looks to the Security Council to authorize military force. As a result, when the post-cold war era (1990-2000) had an increase in non-military threats — including gross and systematic violations of human rights and obstructions in the delivery of humanitarian assistance — the UN saw Somalia and Rwanda’s situations as constituting threats to international peace and security.