Doctrine Of Humanitarian Intervention Research Articles

Who is My Neighbour?

High Commissioner for Canada, London, and former ambassador to Rome and to Moscow. Although he was not a member of Prime Minister Trudeau's inner circle, Jeremy Kinsman served him, as did many others, over the years in question. The views and recollections in this article, first presented as a paper at a colloquium on Pierre Elliott Trudeau at Southampton University in December 2001, are the author's. Who is my neighbour? Is she the woman rummaging for food in the back streets of an Asian shanty town? Is he the man in South America in prison for leading a trade union? The people dying in Africa for lack of medical care, or clean water, are they my neighbours? What about those who are dying in the spirit in the villages of India for lack of a job, or an education, or hope? Are my neighbours the children running from the sound of gunfire in the streets of Beirut? If we, the peoples of the North, say yes, then we will act; we will act together to keep hope alive. If we say no, then they are doomed and so are we. Pierre Trudeau, 15 June 1981(1)INTRODUCTIONPierre Elliott Trudeau's impact on Canada was enormous. His dual commitment to individual civil liberties and to building the Canadian nation resulted in a charter of rights enshrined inside a patriated constitution and a changed country. In foreign policy, where he dealt with a wider and changing world, not so amenable to shaping by any one middle power, his impact was less convincing. Moreover, a political leadership career spanning 16 years inevitably takes one down a long and winding road. Inconsistency-seekers can feast on a record that long - no matter what the vision.Trudeau's foreign policy was assembled from within a conceptual framework analogous to his view of Canada and Canadians that emphasized nation-building within a general vision on the great fault-lines of global relations: North-South and East-West.For all the twists in his foreign policies, Trudeau was remarkably consistent in his commitment to individual civil rights, and to the rights of individual states to be free from arbitrary interference in their affairs, which necessarily involved something of a contradiction. At the time, the doctrine of humanitarian intervention had not yet been developed. Though Trudeau the anti-racist abhorred apartheid, and the assumptions governing the conduct of racist Rhodesia, Trudeau the international jurist was less confrontational on the issue of individual political freedoms within the socialist states of eastern Europe. Whatever he thought of individual regimes, he endeavoured to work with them. For example, he promoted detente with the Soviet Union in the full knowledge that if he had been made to live there it would have been as a recidivist dissident in prison. Still, he was a real friend of Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, or of Cuba's Fidel Castro for that matter, when they were turning the screws on their own societies. Explanation? They were nation-builders, which he admired; he was one himself.Trudeau was an interventionist in favour of a better deal for poorer countries and peoples, and he was a great promoter of detente. As will be seen, his efforts in both areas frequently caused problems with the United States.By the time he left office in 1984, some already saw his internationalist vision as a voice from a less realistic and more dirigiste past. Sceptical international conservatism, identified with President Ronald Reagan in the United States and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Britain, held sway. But it is illuminating to look back at the Trudeau years from the viewpoint of the world today, to record not just how much international ground he broke on Canada's behalf, but also how much of his global vision has become more common twenty years on.The Present ContextIn the aftermath of 11 September 2001, discussions about the shape, order, and stresses of our world are rife. …

Humanitarian Intervention without the Security Council: From San Francisco to Kosovo – and Beyond

AbstractAgainst the background of NATO's war over Kosovo in 1999, this article deals with legal and legal-political aspects of humanitarian intervention without authorisation from the UN Security Council – an issue elucidating the foundations of international law and the role of state practice in its dynamic development. It is argued that unauthorised humanitarian intervention has no legal basis in current international law: It is incompatible with Article 2(4) of the Charter, the defence of a state of necessity is not applicable and no doctrine of unauthorised humanitarian intervention has been established under customary international law. From a legal-political perspective, the crucial question is whether to develop a doctrine of humanitarian intervention without the Security Council if necessary, or stick to the existing legal order, maintaining the Security Council as the sole authoritative organ for decision-making on humanitarian intervention, while working to make it more effective. The author favours the latter alternative. However, in the short term, an ad hoc ``emergency exit'' may be needed. The special circumstances precluding wrongfulness, such as state necessity, it is argued, are not a conceptually suitable framework for justifying humanitarian intervention. But unauthorised humanitarian intervention could be undertaken ad hoc, as a deviation from international law justified solely on moral grounds. This leaves open an option for intervention in extreme cases of human suffering, but at the same time avoids jeopardising the existing, hard-earned, international legal order and the central role of the Security Council. NATO's war over Kosovo, it is argued, was such a case of ad hoc intervention on moral grounds. The article assesses the legal-political consequences of this approach in the aftermath of NATO's bombing campaign.

The US, Iraq and the use of force in a unipolar world

In Operation Desert Fox, and during the aerial bombardment of Iraq that has followed, the United States and the United Kingdom argued that they were acting to enforce the 'will' of the UN Security Council, that they were responding to a 'material breach' of the cease-fire that ended the 1991 Gulf War, and also that they were pre-empting Iraq's future potential use of weapons of mass destruction. Neither of the first two arguments stands up to legal scrutiny, while the third suggests a doctrine of preventive war that carries with it extremely dangerous implications for international relations. Rather than strengthening the existing structures of international order, the armed action against Iraq has undermined them, and has unacceptably tainted the development of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention in general international law.