The So-called ‘Right’ of Humanitarian Intervention

Abstract

Humanitarian intervention, a long-standing issue in international legal writing and in state practice, has become a major focus of international legal thinking and military action. Since the early 1990s, there have been new and unexpected elements in the practice of intervention, in its authorization, and in debates about it. Action by outside military forces in several territories — northern Iraq, Somalia, Haiti and Kosovo — has provoked questions about whether there is a right of humanitarian intervention. In addition, the debate on the subject has been spurred by the strong sense that there were crises (most notably, the genocide in Rwanda in 1994) in which the international community should have intervened promptly but failed to do so.