The Role of the Media in Monitoring International Humanitarian Law during Military Interventions: The Case of Kosovo

Abstract

This article explores the gap between International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and its implementation by means of military interventions. We suggest that using states’ militaries to resolve humanitarian crises sometimes runs the risk of causing new forms of IHL violations that go unnoticed or are simply minimized because of the belief that a larger humanitarian goal has been served. Because so-called humanitarian forces in the past decade have often acted as if they are not bound to respect the basic norms of IHL, a space of mediation has remained open between IHL and state-sponsored military interventions. This space has yet to be occupied by international actors other than states. In this study, we evaluate the possibility that the media may serve as such an actor. As allegedly objective mediators, the media have a responsibility to report human rights and humanitarian law violations, even when humanitarian interventionist troops, the alleged “good guys,” are directly at fault. To determine whether the media can reduce the space of normative incompatibility between IHL and state-sponsored humanitarian interventions, we examine their role in the Kosovo conflict of 1999.