Right Of Humanitarian Intervention Research Articles

REVISITING THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT AS AN INTERNATIONAL NORM

The purpose of the paper is to revisit the origin of the principle of responsibility to protect (R2P) focusing on few cases and reflecting on the troubled journey that it has made maneuvering its structural constraints posed by hegemonic powers and geopolitical manipulations, by employing historical methods in tracking its evolution. The inter-state aggression during the Cold War, largely gave way to war and violence within, after the end of it, rather than between, states. There were two opposing views at the United Nations (UN): those who supported right of humanitarian intervention and those who viewed such a doctrine as an infringement upon national sovereignty. In this regard, R2P remains a developing principle and, the absence of definitive state practice in this area means that states wanting to intervene to protect foreign populations from atrocities are left without clear legal justification for such action. In the absence of UN Security Council authorisation, use of force under the banner of R2P remains contentious. Lastly, the paper discusses the prospects the principle will have in future as constraints and manipulations are still present.

Humanitarian Intervention (Encyclopedia Entry)

This short entry — written for an encyclopedia on human rights issues — offers a succinct overview of the debate about humanitarian intervention under international law. It outlines the applicable rules of the UN Charter and customary international law and summarises State practice in the field. Its argues that international law as it stands does not recognise a right of humanitarian intervention outside the UN; however, in individual instances, uses of force that ostensibly averted humanitarian catastrophes have been tolerated. Collective humanitarian interventions, undertaken with Security Council mandate, are no doubt permissible; but in times of strategic confrontation between the Council's permanent members, the prospect for them is slim. Looking ahead, one might envisage an increased role for the General Assembly: an intervention recommended by the General Assembly might stand a strong chance of being tolerated; and the same could be true for humanitarian interventions with a robust regional mandate. Yet so far, during decades of debate, concerns about abuse have proved to be the most powerful consideration.

Jus Cogens Versus the Chapter VII Powers of the Security Council: With Particular References to Humanitarian Intervention and Terrorism

Abstract The idea of the hierarchical superiority of jus cogens norms in relation to all other norms or actions has gained track. Hence, today, the widely held view is that even decisions of the Security Council cannot contravene imperative norms. This runs counter to the indispensable powers of this organ to do whatever it takes to maintain peace. The argument is that the Security Council can, in the face of a threat or breach of peace, one that, in extremis, has the potential to eradicate the human race, take or authorise necessary action even if this action collides with jus cogens. Such decisions of the Security Council may target every single world entity or individual. Moreover, the world peace body can also legislate and create peremptory norms that are binding upon the whole world. This Article fleshes out the constitutional framework in which the exercise of these powers should be understood and uses as illustrations the old alleged right of humanitarian intervention and the new jus cogens crime of terrorism.

Uniting for Peace Not Aggression: Responding to Chemical Weapons in Syria Without Breaking the Law

In April 2018 in response to a chemical weapons attack in Syria, the USA, UK and France attacked Syrian chemical weapons facilities without Security Council authorisation. The intervention was illegal but widely supported. The events epitomised a declining respect for the international rules on the use of force and for the international institutions charged with implementing those rules-a trend that has correlated with an escalation in violent conflict throughout the world. In other words, the credibility of international law and institutions is declining just as we need them most. This article describes the chemical weapons attack in Syria in April 2018, the retaliatory strikes, and the justifications and reactions that followed. It then describes the applicable legal framework (the UN Charter, humanitarian intervention, the responsibility to protect and the Chemical Weapons Convention), and the normative implications of the strikes. It is argued that international law recognises neither a right of humanitarian intervention nor a right to use force to prevent the use of chemical weapons. What international law does recognise, as articulated in the General Assembly's Uniting for Peace Resolution, is the residual responsibility of the General Assembly to maintain international peace and security when the Security Council fails. It is argued that where the Security Council has clearly failed to exercise its responsibility, it is incumbent upon the Council through procedural vote to refer the situation to the General Assembly, and it is then incumbent upon the Assembly to act on its secondary responsibility. This is an under-utilised procedure that allows concerned States to respond to atrocities such as those in Syria without breaking the law.

SHOULD INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZE A RIGHT OF HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION?

AbstractThe ongoing Syrian civil war calls for a re-evaluation of using force to protect human rights. This article does not rake over the much-debated issue of whether a right of humanitarian intervention exists aslex lata. Instead, it addresses the little reviewed normative issue of whether the rightshouldexist in international law to support and reflect a pluralistic understanding of sovereignty. Despite advancements in international human rights law, international humanitarian law and international criminal law, this wider fabric of international law preserves Westphalian sovereignty and the principle of non-intervention. It denies any right of humanitarian intervention.

Was Westphalia ‘all that’? Hobbes, Bellarmine, and the norm of non-intervention

AbstractRecently, historians of the international system have called into question the significance of the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648 as the moment when the international system formed. One of their primary arguments is that the non-intervention norm typically associated with Westphalian notions of sovereignty developed much later. This paper will examine the early 17th-century debates over the right of the Pope to depose monarchs in the defense of spiritual matters. I read Part III and Part IV of Hobbes’Leviathanin its intellectual context to see how his theory of sovereignty was partially developed to support a theory of non-intervention. This reading leads to two important contributions to current political science debates. First, it refutes the growing consensus that non-intervention developed as an aspect of sovereignty only in the late 18th and early 19th century. Second, the paper addresses current attempts to assert a right of humanitarian intervention. By exploring similarities between these recent debates and those between Bellarmine and Hobbes in the 17th century, I offer a fresh perspective on what is at stake in current claims to international community.

Olivier Corten, The Law Against War

Olivier Corten�s book, The Law Against War. is a translated and updated version of the initial French publication of 2008 (Le droit contre la guerre (Pedone)), which has been praised in the French speaking world for constituting a wide ranging study of the law on the use of force that fills a gap in the literature. Indeed, this extensive and in-depth analysis of the prohibition of the use of armed force and its exceptions in current public international law provides a welcome clarification of the status and the content of controversial legal concepts concerning the recourse to force, such as the doctrines of anticipatory and pre-emptive self-defence and the institution of the right of humanitarian intervention. Corten�s approach is a positivist legal one: he rigorously analyses state practice and case law since 1945 in order to determine the existence of customary rules relating to the use of force. The book is divided into eight chapters arranged into two parts. The first part delimits the principle of the prohibition of the use of force. In Chapter 1, Corten investigates the methodological issues the principle raises. He postulates the existence of an international law regime on the use of force and intends to identify customary norms in the attitudes of states relating to the use of force. In the next chapter, Corten defines the concepts of �force� and �threat of force� in Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter. According to the author the notion of �force� covers only military force and does not concern simple police measures, the former being defined as coercive acts of a certain gravity by one state reflecting the intent to compel the will of another state. The definition of �threat of force� is particularly interesting since only a few other commentators have interpreted this notion in �

Does Humanitarian Intervention Serve Human Rights? The Case of Kosovo

The new trend of interventionism, illustrated by NATO's bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999, has raised serious concerns in International Law. In particular, Operation Allied Force has revived the debate on the existence of a right of humanitarian intervention. In this context, the aim of the present contribution is to reaffirm that no right of humanitarian intervention exists under International Law, and that such right would lead to abuses in the name of human rights. To do so, we will revisit the Charter of the United Nations, before going through the state practice since the adoption of the UN Charter with a special emphasis on the intervention against Serbia in 1999.

The Responsibility to Protect in Environmental Emergencies

This panel was convened at 9:00 a.m., Thursday, March 26, by its moderator, Gwen Young of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who introduced the panelists: Linda Malone of the College of William & Mary; Gareth Evans, President of the International Crisis Group; and Edward C. Luck, Senior Vice President of the International Peace Institute. GREEN HELMETS: ECO-INTERVENTION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY UNILATERAL AND MULTILATERAL INTERVENTION In terms of unilateral or multilateral use of force without United Nations authorization, the twentieth century law of ecological response is primarily law of ecological intervention, not ecological defense or disaster prevention. In Robyn Eckersley's 2008 article, Ecological Intervention: Prospects and Limits, in Ethics and International Affairs, she posits three different categories of environmental harm: (1) major environmental emergencies with transboundary spillover effects that threaten public safety in the wider region; (2) ecocide or crimes against nature that also involve genocide or serious human rights violations (irrespective of spillover effects); and (3) ecocide or crimes against nature that are confined within the territory of the offending and that involve no serious human rights violations. The core provision of the United Nations Charter with respect to the unilateral use of force outside the United Nations machinery is Article 51. The Charter's preservation of the right of self defense when there is an against a state is ill-suited to evaluation of forceful response to avert an environmental disaster. The legality of a forceful response to environmental harm is more easily justified when the environmental harm is deliberately inflicted by a against another state, or even by a group of nonstate actors, than when it is the result of dereliction of duty on the part of a state. Deliberate damage inflicted by one or a group of nonstate actors on another through pollution, hazardous substances, disease agents, or unleashing of natural resources (for example, destroying a dam) may be deemed an armed against the territorial integrity and political independence of a state, and such actions by agents or nonstate actors may constitute genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, or ethnic cleansing, as discussed more fully below. If the transboundary environmental emergency is attributable to a state's failure to govern or regulate adequately its industry or resources, however, is there the necessary responsibility to characterize the transboundary harm as an attack triggering a right of forceful self-defense? In an unusual twist, it may be easier to hold the nonstate actor terrorists liable for an armed for the unintended consequences of their criminal acts in such circumstances, under basic principles of accountability for the unintended but foreseeable consequences of intentional criminal behavior. If the environmental damage inflicted is genocidal in design and intent, or can be characterized as any other serious human rights violation, the law of humanitarian intervention may be utilized to justify force regardless of any transboundary effects. Indeed, if the ecocide qualifies as genocide or a grave breach of the laws of war, other states would have an affirmative obligation to intervene to curtail the human fights violation. Of course, the ambiguity in the legal norm as to what extent or type of other human rights violations would trigger a right of humanitarian intervention is intensified when the or nonstate actor perpetrator effectuates a human rights violation by inflicting damage on the environment rather than directly on the human population. As the natural disaster in Myanmar illustrates, even if late twentieth-century law had begun to recognize an obligation of assistance to states dealing with natural or, presumably, instigated natural disasters, a concomitant legal obligation to accept assistance had remained mired in traditional notions of sovereignty. …

The Controversies Over the Customary Prohibition on the Use of Force: A Methodological Debate

Controversies about the rule prohibiting the use of force have mainly focused on issues such as the conditions for self-defence or the existence of a right to humanitarian intervention. Beyond the question of the validity or relevance of each substantial argument, a comprehensive analysis of the doctrine reveals that the debate is actually more about methodology than substance. Hence, those who stand for an enlarged conception of the right to self-defence or who support a right of humanitarian intervention tend to adopt a particularly loose method in defining the content of the customary rule.

The Liberal Case for Humanitarian Intervention

Introduction In this chapter I argue that humanitarian intervention is morally justified in appropriate cases. The argument centrally rests on a standard assumption of liberal political philosophy: a major purpose of states and governments is to protect and secure human rights, that is, rights that all persons have by virtue of personhood alone. Governments and others in power who seriously violate those rights undermine the one reason that justifies their political power, and thus should not be protected by international law. A corollary of the argument is that, to the extent that state sovereignty is a value, it is an instrumental, not an intrinsic, value. Sovereignty serves valuable human ends, and those who grossly assault them should not be allowed to shield themselves behind the sovereignty principle. Tyranny and anarchy cause the moral collapse of sovereignty. I supplement this argument with further moral assumptions. The fact that persons are right-holders has normative consequences for others. We all have (1) the obligation to respect those rights; (2) the obligation to promote such respect for all persons; (3) depending on the circumstances, the obligation to rescue victims of tyranny or anarchy, if we can do so at a reasonable cost to ourselves. The obligation in (3) analytically entails, under appropriate circumstances, the right to rescue such victims – the right of humanitarian intervention. Because human rights are rights held by individuals by virtue of their personhood, they are independent of history, culture, or national borders.

Global Justice: Is Interventionalism Desirable?

In 1994, the European Parliament published a resolution on the right of humanitarian intervention. Interestingly, the declaration maintains that such intervention is not in contradiction with international law, although it formulates the concept of right in a way that is translatable into the vocabulary of individual rights. I analyze some implications of the resolution for the mutual duties of states. I thereby focus my attention on two possible applications: by way of Rawls's duty of assistance and by way of the cosmopolitan theory of global distributive justice. I conclude that the latter theory promises better results for protecting individuals' basic rights, but I also show that it is at the cost of a strongly interventionist structure requiring a powerful supranational institution. Finally, I envision the conditions under which such an increase of interventionism in favor of human rights can be acceptable.

The So-called ‘Right’ of Humanitarian Intervention

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.

Humanitarian intervention revisited: Post‐cold war responses to classical problems

Ever since the idea of humanitarian intervention was born in the minds of pre‐Westphalian writers like Grotius, Gentili and Suárez, it has been disputed in the theory and practice of international relations on the grounds that it threatens the institutional bases of international order. But just how serious are the problems of humanitarian intervention, and will they prove to be fatal for the early post‐Cold War experiment with military humanitarianism? To answer these questions this article offers a distinction between ‘systemic’ problems threatening the working of international society, and operational problems threatening the successful implementation of the given intervention. While the traditional fear of undermining international order should not be taken to be a decisive argument against a right of humanitarian intervention, the recent attempts to realize the ideals of humanitarianism have in some cases been severely plagued by operational problems like military stalemate and poor humanitarian results. Thus, when dealing with serious humanitarian crises like the recent ones in Somalia and Bosnia, the cautious approach of extended peacekeeping appears to be a poor substitute for the Grotian ideal of full‐blown humanitarian intervention in defence of the suffering.

Common Rights of Mankind in Gentili, Grotius and Suárez

Students of the concept of erga omnes trace its antecedents to the early recognition of the right of humanitarian intervention, which they often attribute to Grotius. Professor Hersch Lauterpacht asserted that Grotius’s writings contained “the first authoritative statement of the principle of humanitarian intervention— the principle that exclusiveness of domestic jurisdiction stops when outrage upon humanity begins.” However, some of the other principal works on international law before the Peace of Westphalia (1648) reveal that the concept of community interests, and the modern right of humanitarian intervention it spawned, is pre-Grotian, that it appeared in the writings of Suárez and figured prominently in those of its true progenitor, the earlier Gentili.