Kosovo and Elsewhere. Military Interventions in Defence of Human Rights (“Humanitarian Interventions”)

Abstract

Protecting human and citizens’ rights against violations initiated by citizens, groups in society or individual state officials, is traditionally the task of any state. However, if these rights are threatened or violated by the state organs themselves to a severe, extensive and sustainable degree, then according to the commonly held view, it is the task of the people of the sovereign state to exert pressure on the state organs to change their behaviour, or to replace them by others through peaceful or violent revolution. For a long time, the principles of state sovereignty and integrity and non-involvement in internal state affairs according to international law prohibited other states or international bodies from intervening in those states in which the state organs were incapable of protecting human rights, or were even themselves seriously guilty of violating them. Thus, other states have repeatedly tolerated the mass extermination in some countries by those holding state power or their allies of their own citizens, particularly in times of war, but also in peacetime (Rwanda in the 1990s, the Soviet Union during the 1930s).

The internationalisation of human society and politics and of the media makes it increasingly difficult and morally and politically insupportable to look the other way when inner-state mass murder is committed. It also increases the pressure for military intervention in order to protect the citizens against their own state organs and fellow citizens. In the case of the Serbian-Yugoslav policy of forced migration and murder in Kosovo, NATO intervened without a UN mandate from March to June 1999 with massive aerial bombardments. From March to October 2011, it did the same in Libya, albeit with authorisation from the UN.

Humanitarian interventions remain controversial in terms of international law, and not only in principle due to their contravention of the prohibition on aggression and the principle of sovereignty. They are also easily open to suspicion of using the protection of human rights as a screen for pursuing other interests entirely. Politics and international law would first have to develop new regulations on the compatibility of the two principles of the international protection of human rights, and of state sovereignty and non-intervention in domestic state affairs. These new regulations could be put into practice by the Security Council of the United Nations, or better still by new institutions such as a court of intervention or trusteeship council for the protection of human rights, in order to make a clear institutional differentiation between the legal condemnation of a precarious human rights situation and the implementation of military intervention as protection against severe violations of human rights.