GLOBAL DIALOGUE Volume 7 ● Number 1–2 ● Winter/Spring 2005—Humanitarian Intervention

Rights and Responsibilities: The Dilemma of Humanitarian Intervention

CHRIS ABBOTT

Chris Abbott is a member of Oxford Research Group [www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk].

The foundations of international law with regard to state sovereignty were shaped by the agreements made by European states as part of the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648. The sovereign authority of the state was established within a system of independent and equal units, as a way of securing peace and order in Europe after nearly thirty years of war. The post-1945 system of international order enshrined in the United Nations Charter is based on this model. In accordance with Article 2.1 of the charter, the United Nations is founded on the principle of the sovereign equality of all member states. The principle of non-interference in affairs that are within the domestic jurisdiction of states is enshrined in Article 2.7. A sovereign state is empowered in international law to exercise total jurisdiction within its territorial borders. In turn, other states have the duty not to intervene in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. This post-colonial principle is most heavily supported and defended by vulnerable states, as it offers their last defence in the face of pressure from more powerful states, particularly in today’s globalised world.

Just war theory and the Westphalian concept of state sovereignty should mean that, on the whole, what happens inside a state is its own affair as long as it takes place within the limits of international law. However, since the early 1990s, there has been a growing argument that sometimes there are human rights violations so severe that the use of force is the only reasonable option to halt them, and that the concept of non-interference must occasionally yield to the international responsibility to protect the targeted population. This so-called right or duty of humanitarian intervention refers, in such instances, to action taken against a state or its leaders, without their consent, for purposes which are claimed to be humanitarian or protective (the most controversial form of such intervention being military).

According to the Canadian observer Heidi Hulan, the current debate regarding humanitarian intervention takes place in the context of “geopolitical shifts which have fundamentally altered the global security environment since the United Nations Charter was drafted”.¹ She argues that the most important geopolitical shifts post-1945 are:

1. The process of decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s which led to the emergence of a large number of new states in Africa and Asia.

2. The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s and the emergence of new state actors.

3. The trend towards global interdependence, which has made borders more permeable, increased contacts at the sub-national level, and widened the transnational impact of internal conflict.

The problem is that there are no agreed rules about humanitarian intervention to guide the international community in responding to individual situations as they arise, or to judge the legitimacy and legality of intervention in each case. There is a disparity between modern-day global security challenges and the rules currently in place for managing international peace and security, particularly in relation to humanitarian intervention.

Oxford Research Group is undertaking a long-term programme of work exploring the concept and application of humanitarian intervention. As part of that work, this paper examines attempts to conceptualise the use of military intervention on humanitarian grounds, and discusses the way forward in light of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and the US-led “war on terror”.

Intervention: From Duty to Right

The devoir d’ingérence (duty of intervention) was a term first coined in the late 1980s by Professor Mario Bettati and the French politician Bernard Kouchner. They opposed the use of the Westphalian concept of state sovereignty to defend states that grossly violated their populations’ fundamental human rights. Following Saddam Hussein’s assault on Iraqi Kurds in 1991, Kouchner and others in the Mitterrand government pushed for a droit d’ingérence humanitaire (right of humanitarian intervention)—the right of states to intervene when states oppress their own citizens. Kouchner (who co-founded Médecins Sans Frontières in 1971) argued that some so-called humanitarian crises were caused by political motives and therefore could only be addressed by decisive exercises of state power.

Previously, humanitarian action was “disinterested”, and carried out within the “humanitarian space” (a zone free of political interference) under what might be called a doctrine of silent neutrality. This doctrine was observed by, for example, the International Committee of the Red Cross in the Nigerian–Biafran civil war of 1967–70. Kouchner and others championed a more politically engaged humanitarian action. At first, this was meant only as the right of states to provide humanitarian relief even when the violating state refused to give permission.

The Kouchnerian notion of the right to intervene on humanitarian grounds was used by the United Nations in Iraq in 1991 and Somalia in 1992, and by France in Rwanda in 1994. A full application of this approach to humanitarian action came in the form of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) operations in Bosnia in 1994–5. UNPROFOR’s mission was to deliver humanitarian relief to trapped refugees and encircled civilian populations in cities under siege in places like Sarajevo. However, the fundamental weakness of this approach was that intervention did not mean stopping the actual fighting that was causing the humanitarian crisis in the first place. UN troops were only allowed to defend themselves or protect humanitarian workers seeking to distribute aid. They could do little when, for example, Serbs massacred seven thousand Muslim men and boys in the UN “safe area” of Srebrenica in July 1995.

The Srebrenica massacre did little to advance the Kouchnerian notion of using military intervention solely to enable the delivery of aid to civilians during a civil war, without trying to coerce the different sides into ceasing hostilities. In Bosnia, humanitarian action had been used as a substitute for political action, with dire consequences. However, the concept of humanitarian intervention looked very different during the 1999 NATO campaign in Kosovo.

The Blair Doctrine

In Kosovo, it was considered necessary to use NATO air strikes to roll back ethnic aggression, and even to provide military assistance to victims seeking to defend themselves. In supporting the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), the US/UK-led coalition took sides in what was essentially a civil war. Kosovo was the first time military means were used to create a “humanitarian space” for aiding the civilian population and the reconstruction of a country.

Michael Ignatieff has argued that intervention in Kosovo increasingly began to look like an imperial action because it required imperial means (garrisons of troops, a foreign civilian administration) and because it served imperial means (the creation of political stability in the south Balkans, the containment of refugee flows, and the control of crime and of the trafficking of drugs and humans).² Traditional humanitarian agencies were appalled by the way humanitarian motives were now being employed as a defence of military action (a defence that seems familiar post–11 September and from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars).

At the time, the British prime minister, Tony Blair, argued that the most pressing foreign-policy problem was to identify the circumstances in which states should become actively involved in other people’s conflicts. He first laid out his “doctrine of the international community” (which has also become known simply as the “Blair doctrine”) in a speech to the Chicago Economic Club on 22 April 1999. Applying the doctrine to international security and humanitarian intervention, Blair invoked the idea of a just war, one based not on any territorial ambitions but on values (although Kosovo certainly did not fit the notion of a just war, either in its justification or its conduct, as laid out in traditional just war theory). Although he stressed that the principle of non-interference should not lightly be rejected, Blair argued that it must be qualified in certain important respects: acts of genocide, for example, could never be a purely internal matter. Therefore, he proposed the following five major considerations in deciding when and where to intervene:

1. Are we sure of our case?

2. Have we exhausted all diplomatic options?

3. Are there military operations we can sensibly and prudently undertake?

4. Are we prepared for the long term?

5. Do we have national interests involved?

Blair (or Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, who purportedly provided the intellectual backbone, and much of the wording, of this part of the Chicago speech) did not suggest these as absolute tests, but as the kinds of issue that need to be considered when deciding when and where to intervene. Blair also argued that these rules would only work if a new way could be found to make the United Nations operate, and so avoid the deadlock that had undermined the effectiveness of the Security Council during the Cold War. However, when the policy planning staff at the Foreign Office tried to translate Blair’s speech into a strategy document, relating it to international institutions such as the United Nations, they reportedly failed after weeks of effort.³

The Blair doctrine of the international community suffers from some fundamental difficulties, not least of which is the question, who is the international community? From a village in Kosovo, Serbs may have been forgiven for thinking that they were being bombed by a small group of Western nations that had simply decided to call themselves the “international community”. They may also have been forgiven for thinking that, in seeking secession, the KLA had managed to manipulate external intervention to advance its political purposes. Which in turn leads to another challenge: whose values are we upholding? Who decides which side is “good” and which “bad” in any conflict? The values should relate to those rights accorded to people under the large body of international human rights law, not those values that the so-called international community has held up, sometimes legitimately and sometimes not, as ad hoc explanations for the use of military force.

The problem remains that any force with the power to intervene independently of the United Nations could have interests that extend beyond the cessation of genocide and the liberation of the oppressed. Furthermore, it seems that intervention will only be exercised by the strong against the weak (indeed, it is hard to imagine that in his Chicago speech Blair was calling for an invasion of China on behalf of the Tibetans). Not only are Blair’s criteria for intervention too weak to divorce humanitarianism from imperialism (in terms of both its intention and application), but his version of intervention seems to emphasise military intervention, and then only as a reactive measure (that is, military intervention after, for example, a genocide had already begun). As Blair himself recognised, there are also political, diplomatic, economic and financial measures that can be used. In addition, very little attention has been paid to preventing humanitarian crises in the first place.

UN Authorisation

Whatever the merits or demerits of Blair’s Chicago speech, the 1990s had become somewhat a decade of humanitarian intervention. In the period between the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s and the growing threat from international terrorism at the beginning of the new millennium, notions of a just war were enjoying a revival in the context of this new era of humanitarian intervention. This was even when some of the interventions at best looked like taking sides in a messy civil war, or at worst like old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy under a veil of moral justice. The decade saw interventions (against the wishes of a government, but with purported humanitarian justifications) in Liberia (1990–7), northern Iraq (1991–present), the former Yugoslavia (1992–present), Somalia (1992–3), Rwanda and eastern Zaire (1994–6), Haiti (1994–7), Sierra Leone (1997–present), Kosovo (1999–present), and East Timor (1999–present).

An important point to note is that the Kosovo bombing in particular is understood by many to have established the norm of resort to force without the authorisation of the UN Security Council. In fact, most humanitarian interventions have taken place without prior UN endorsement. The UN Charter sanctions the use of force only in self-defence under Article 51, or when authorised by the Security Council to prevent an act of aggression or a breach of international peace and security under Chapter VII. Article 2.7 specifically forbids intervention “in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state”, though this injunction can be overridden by a Security Council authorisation under Chapter VII.

The United Nations has intervened in the past to stop gross violations of human rights, for example in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia. However, it has only done so under Chapter VII in the name of preserving the peace (or, some might say, preserving the status quo). Countries seeking to intervene under the remit of the United Nations require a Security Council resolution that, depending on the circumstances, could be vetoed by one or more of the permanent members. The threat of veto hangs over the Security Council. The problem is that its decision whether or not to intervene in a particular conflict does not necessarily reflect internationally agreed objective criteria and legal norms, but the domestic and global imperatives of the five permanent members.

Although the Security Council is the primary body with responsibility for maintaining international peace and security, the General Assembly, under the “Uniting for Peace” procedures agreed in 1950, can recommend collective action, including the use of armed force, when the Security Council is blocked by vetoes or the threat of vetoes. The purpose of Uniting for Peace is to ensure that any incapacity of the Security Council does not prevent the international community from meeting its responsibility to maintain peace in the world. The idea is that there is still a second body in the United Nations, in the form of the General Assembly, which can assume this responsibility.

During the 2003 build-up to the invasion of Iraq, a resolution against the war was not submitted to the Security Council since a veto by the United States and the United Kingdom was fairly certain, and the failure to pass such a resolution might be used to defend the war’s legitimacy. Instead, members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and the Non-Aligned Movement, as well as many areas of civil society, considered calling on the General Assembly to adopt a Uniting for Peace resolution to prevent an attack by the United States and its allies. However, even if the General Assembly had passed such a resolution, it could only have recommended collective action to UN members.

The Uniting for Peace resolution has been employed ten times since its enactment in 1950. Most famously, it was used twice in 1956 by the United States, first when the United Kingdom and France attacked Egypt after it had nationalised the Suez Canal, and again later that year to pressure the Soviet Union to halt its invasion of Hungary. It thus seems somewhat ironic, not to mention hypocritical, that the administration of President George W. Bush worked so hard to prevent the General Assembly from discussing the Iraq invasion under such a resolution.

Another issue is the time taken by the United Nations to respond to humanitarian crises. For example, after the Security Council passed Resolution 918 in May 1994, which increased the UN strength in Rwanda to 5,500 troops, nearly six months passed before the force was eventually deployed, by which point approximately 500,000 Rwandan civilians had already been killed. According to the United Nations Association, in every major UN peacekeeping operation between 1991 and 1999, an interval of three to six months separated the adoption of a UN resolution authorising a mission and the actual deployment of the force.⁴

Because of such delays, there have been calls for the development of a UN standing army as a permanent international force recruited, trained and deployed directly by the United Nations. This highly trained rapid reaction force could be permanently at the disposal of the Security Council, able to respond swiftly to an emerging humanitarian crisis and deployed for a limited time while a traditional UN peacekeeping force is mustered. However, concerns have been raised regarding the legitimacy of such a standing force given that peace operations fall within the domain of the Security Council, which is dominated by the permanent members and under-represents the developing world. Either way, at present there does not seem to be the necessary political will to establish a UN standing army, and other mechanisms are being explored to reduce the UN response time to crises, such as regional rapid reaction forces (as local actors) or even private military companies.

So, should a country stand by and allow genocide, for example, to occur because the Security Council is deadlocked, or does it have the right, or more importantly the duty, to intervene without a UN mandate? Of course, whether genocide is occurring is sometimes hard to determine. During the first half of 2004, debate raged for months over whether genocide was, or was not, taking place in the Darfur region of Sudan—even while tens of thousands of people were being killed and over one million people displaced. Furthermore, any resort to force outside UN auspices leaves the door wide open for misuse of the concept of humanitarian intervention by countries with less than altruistic motives. We should not forget that in 1939 Nazi Germany invoked humanitarian reasons to legitimise its threatened invasion of Czechoslovakia, alleging that ethnic Germans were being mistreated in the Sudetenland. The legitimacy of an intervention is also very much in the eye of the beholder. The United States adamantly opposed Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in 1978, despite the fact that it halted the atrocities being committed by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime. As far as Washington was concerned, the intervention had been carried out by the “wrong” people.

Annan’s Guidelines

Shortly after Blair’s Chicago speech, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan summarised in an article for the Economist what he called the dilemma of humanitarian intervention: “On the one hand, is it legitimate for a regional organisation to use force without a UN mandate? On the other, is it permissible to let gross and systematic violations of human rights, with grave humanitarian consequences, continue unchecked?”⁵ In seeking answers to these questions, Annan discussed four aspects of intervention which, he argued, needed to be considered with special care:

1. “Intervention” should not be understood as referring only to the use of force; the commitment of the world to peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, rehabilitation, and reconstruction varies greatly from region to region.

2. Traditional notions of sovereignty are not the only obstacle to effective action in humanitarian crises: no less significant are the ways in which states define their national interests. A new, broader definition of national interest is needed, one which would induce states to find greater unity in the pursuit of common goals and values, and to recognise that the collective interest is the national interest.

3. In cases where forceful intervention does become necessary, the Security Council must be able to rise to the challenge. The United Nations should be able to find common ground in upholding the principles of the UN Charter and acting in defence of our common humanity.

4. When the fighting stops, the international commitment to peace must be as strong as was the commitment to war.

Annan raised the dilemma of intervention in his speech to the General Assembly in 1999, and again in 2000. He asked the international community to find a new consensus on how to approach the issue and to forge unity around the basic principles and processes involved. He posed the question:

If humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica—to gross and systematic violations of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?⁶

Responsibility to Protect

In response to the challenge laid down by Kofi Annan, Canada’s then–prime minister, Jean Chrétien, announced the establishment of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) during the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000. ICISS was launched by Canada’s then–foreign minister, Lloyd Axworthy, on 14 September 2000. The one-year mandate of this independent commission was to promote a comprehensive global debate on the relationship between intervention and state sovereignty. The goal was to foster an international political consensus on how to move towards action within the UN system.

Following twelve months of intensive research and consultation, ICISS published its report, The Responsibility to Protect, and formally presented it to Annan in December 2001. The report states its central theme as being

the idea that sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their own citizens from avoidable catastrophe—from mass murder and rape, from starvation—but that when they are unwilling or unable to do so, that responsibility must be borne by the broader community of states.⁷

In other words, the report promotes a recharacterisation of the concept of state sovereignty from sovereignty as control to sovereignty as responsibility. It recognises that the rights conferred on a sovereign state are balanced with responsibilities. The report is not an attempt to overturn the norm of non-intervention or norms of state sovereignty, but rather to update them. It argues that where a civilian population is suffering from serious human rights abuses, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to avert these, the principle of non-intervention must yield to the international responsibility to protect that population.

This “responsibility to protect” comprises three specific responsibilities:

1. The responsibility to prevent: to address both the root and direct causes of internal conflict and other manmade crises putting populations at risk.

2. The responsibility to react: to respond to situations of compelling human need with appropriate measures.

3. The responsibility to rebuild: to provide full assistance with recovery, reconstruction and reconciliation.

The international community’s responsibility to prevent is considered the single most important dimension of the “responsibility to protect”, and ICISS argues that prevention options should always be exhausted before intervention is contemplated. However, regarding situations where military intervention for human protection purposes becomes necessary, the report discusses various important principles: the just cause threshold, precautionary principles, right authority, and operational principles. The four precautionary principles that must be considered in relation to any military intervention are identified as:

1. Right intention: the primary purpose of the intervention must be to halt or avert human suffering.

2. Last resort: military intervention can only be justified when every non-military option has been explored.

3. Proportional means: the scale, duration and intensity of the planned military intervention should be the minimum necessary to secure the defined human protection objective.

4. Reasonable prospects: there must be a reasonable chance of success, with the consequences of action not likely to be worse than the consequences of inaction.

ICISS concludes that the most appropriate body to authorise such military intervention is the UN Security Council, and that the most pressing task is to ensure that the Security Council works better than it has in the past. ICISS recommends that the General Assembly adopt a draft declaratory resolution embodying the basic principles of The Responsibility to Protect. It also recommends that the Security Council should seek to reach agreement on a set of guidelines embracing the principles of military intervention, including the precautionary principles outlined above, laid out in the report.

The government of Canada, and other interested governments, have developed plans to ensure that the ICISS recommendations are followed up. The report has been introduced as a UN document and distributed to all UN member states. There is an intergovernmental process to promote and make operational the key concepts of the report, in particular the concept that states have responsibilities as well as rights, including the responsibility to protect.

The Responsibility to Protect has been placed on the formal agenda of the UN General Assembly, and in autumn 2002 Canada attempted to introduce a technical resolution committing the General Assembly to a process of deliberation about the report. However, this met with significant resistance, as some member states which take a cautious approach to these issues feared it would inevitably lead to substantive discussion of the topic of humanitarian intervention. In addition, some countries in the Non-Aligned Movement were concerned about aspects of the report seen as threatening state sovereignty. The Canadian government intends to continue engaging in a long process of deliberation (possibly over a period of years) before moving to formalise any aspect of the ICISS agenda. It is giving considerable thought to the type of procedural mechanisms that would work best to promote this agenda, including involving non-governmental organisations and other civil society actors worldwide. However, a series of World Federalist Movement–Institute for Global Policy (WFM–IGP) consultations with civil society organisations found that the ICISS report was relatively unknown, even within relevant sectors, and that there was a general lack of awareness of international norms concerning human protection issues.⁸

As with the other doctrines of humanitarian intervention discussed in this paper, The Responsibility to Protect is not without its critics. The same WFM–IGP civil society consultations mentioned above highlighted several key issues. Concerns were raised about the central role the report proposes for the Security Council, without full consideration of what should happen if the council fails to act (although the report does discuss the possibility of a General Assembly emergency special session under the Uniting for Peace procedures). Another concern was the report’s emphasis on the responsibilities of sovereign states, which raises the question of what responsibilities failed states or rebel authorities have and how they would be held accountable. However, on the whole, the consultations found strong support for the general principles and framework of the ICISS report.⁹

The report was released only a few months after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States. In the months and years following those attacks, the attention of the international community shifted from humanitarian intervention to the so-called war on terror and the related wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The ICISS report never really entered the public consciousness, and were it not for the efforts of the Canadian government, the UN Secretary-General and certain sectors of civil society (especially the WFM–IGP Responsibility to Protect—Engaging Civil Society programme), the report’s important concepts may have been overlooked altogether. However, the report is slowly gaining international support and is now the subject of numerous roundtables (including at the UN missions in New York) and of informal debate in the UN General Assembly and Security Council. It is expected that the United Nations will have to address more formally the questions relating to sovereignty and intervention within the broader context of UN reform, but it is understood that a UN Charter amendment will not be considered at this stage.

The ‘War on Terror’

In light of the absence of Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, and the affirmation that there was no significant pre-war link between his regime and al-Qaeda, the United States and the United Kingdom now want to claim, retrospectively, humanitarian reasons for the invasion of Iraq. This claim not only lacks credibility, it damages the very concept of humanitarian intervention. Any effort to justify the Iraq War, even in part, in humanitarian terms risks giving humanitarian intervention a bad name. In an increasingly cynical world, will the public believe their elected leaders when they next ask for support for armed interventions, whatever the reasons offered? Humanitarian intervention has become linked to military invasion and the “war on terror”. This is a link Tony Blair is happy to promote, as demonstrated in a speech in his Sedgefield constituency on 5 March 2004:

Already, before September 11th the world’s view of the justification of military action had been changing. The only clear case in international relations for armed intervention had been self-defence, response to aggression. But the notion of intervening on humanitarian grounds had been gaining currency. I set this out, following the Kosovo war, in a speech in Chicago in 1999, where I called for a doctrine of international community, where in certain clear circumstances we do intervene, even though we are not directly threatened …

Containment will not work in the face of the global threat that confronts us. The terrorists have no intention of being contained … Emphatically I am not saying that every situation leads to military action. But we surely have a duty and a right to prevent the threat materialising; and we surely have a responsibility to act when a nation’s people are subjected to a regime such as Saddam’s.

It is important to recognise how different this is from the 1999 speech Blair gave in Chicago. It is difficult to see how anything in the Chicago speech (or in the ICISS recommendations) would sanction the removal by force of a dictator such as Saddam Hussein. Similarly, a war fought to pre-empt potential future terrorist attacks has only the remotest conceptual link to the right of humanitarian intervention, particularly as there is no way of guaranteeing that fewer civilian lives would be lost in such a war than in the feared terrorist attacks. This last point is important in light of one of the key elements of just war theory, jus in bello: innocent people and non-combatants should not be harmed and only appropriate force should be used.

There is an increased blurring in political thought and rhetoric between intervention on humanitarian grounds and pre-emptive strikes to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction or avert future terrorist attacks. This link between the so-called war on terror and humanitarian intervention is something that ICISS itself rejected. In the foreword to The Responsibility to Protect, the authors explain that the framework ICISS developed for addressing human protection claims in other states must not be confused with the framework necessary for responding to terrorist attacks in one’s own state. The two issues are “fundamentally different”. However, the report does go on to say:

We have no difficulty in principle with focussed military action being taken against international terrorists and those who harbour them. But military power should always be exercised in a principled way, and the principles of right intention, last resort, proportional means and reasonable prospects outlined in our report are, on the face of it, all applicable to such action.¹⁰

It is clear that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the manner in which these wars were fought, do not fulfil the general principles of The Responsibility to Protect or the four precautionary principles ICISS identified. They bear no relation to the right of humanitarian intervention or, for that matter, to Blair’s own criteria for intervention discussed earlier in this paper. Testament to this are the several thousand Iraqi civilian and military deaths¹¹ (and also the smaller number of coalition military deaths in Iraq). In Afghanistan, the Taliban may have been ousted from power, but more innocent civilians were killed as a direct result of the US-led invasion than died in the 11 September attacks that prompted it. The US-led “war on terror” must be kept clearly separate from the right of humanitarian intervention if we are to move forward with developing a rigorous, consistent and legitimate application of the “responsibility to protect”.

The “war on terror” is causing a further problem for the United Nations itself. The insistence of the Bush administration that its allies contribute troops and other resources to its campaign in Iraq (and to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan), rather than to UN programmes, is leaving a depleted United Nations short of the necessary resources for peacekeeping and post-conflict operations in other, predominately non-oil-producing, parts of the world. This is turn has serious implications for the effectiveness of future UN military operations in response to humanitarian crises.

The Afghanistan and Iraq wars were not humanitarian interventions, but the current cynicism they have created about the use of military force for humanitarian purposes could have devastating consequences for persecuted peoples needing assistance in the future. The people of Darfur may be among the first victims of this development. In September 2004, Sudan’s parliamentary speaker, Ahmad Ibrahim al-Tahir, reportedly warned against intervention in his country, saying: “If Iraq opened one gate of hell for the West, we will open seven of its gates. We will not surrender this country.”¹² Unfortunately, although some hope Bush’s re-election as US president may see him shift in his second term from attacking the “symptoms” of terrorism and political violence (through his so-called war on terror) to addressing some of their root causes, it may also lead to more interventions justified publicly on partly “humanitarian” grounds.

Following nearly four years of the “war on terror”, the concept of humanitarian intervention is now clearly back on the international agenda. The United States seems determined to spread “freedom” and market-based “democracy” in the Middle East; the European Union is developing its own rapid reaction force (deployable on sixty days’ notice) and a series of elite battle groups (deployable on fifteen days’ notice) to deal with humanitarian crises, particularly in Africa; and the United Nations may yet threaten sanctions, or even military intervention, over Darfur. This latter crisis in particular has focused attention on the need for a clear framework for humanitarian interventions. In September 2004 alone, the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, the Canadian prime minister, Paul Martin, and the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, all cited Darfur in key speeches relating to the principle of humanitarian intervention.

However, given the problems and setbacks discussed in this paper, can a universally acceptable doctrine of humanitarian intervention be developed and defended by the wider international community? In short, the answer is that it can, because it must. There is some resistance in government circles to developing a framework within which interventions can be placed, but there is a very real need for a flexible framework to be adopted if interventions are to be seen as legitimate by those countries in whose affairs the “international community” tends to intervene.

No country is going to intervene against, for example, China on behalf of the Tibetans, or against the United States and the United Kingdom on behalf of the Chagos Islanders.¹³ It is the politically and militarily weaker states of Africa, and the strategically important states of the Middle East, that will face the threat of “humanitarian” interventions. If these interventions are to be legitimate in the eyes of all states, then they must be carried out within an internationally agreed framework that clearly distinguishes humanitarian needs from imperial actions (or humanitarian actions from imperial needs). The decision to intervene or not must also be made by an organisation that is open, accountable and representative.

Fortunately, in the form of the United Nations, the world already has in place a military and diplomatic organisation with the potential capacity (though maybe not the will) to deal with all peace, security and human protection issues. Collective intervention approved by the United Nations is widely seen as legitimate because it is authorised by a representative international body. Interventions taken outside the UN system are often seen as illegitimate because they can be self-interested, with humanitarian reasons offered as a secondary justification for military action.

Furthermore, we also have a robust and progressive doctrine of humanitarian intervention in the form of the framework and recommendations set out in the ICISS report, The Responsibility to Protect. Oxford Research Group is part of the call from many areas of civil society to support this document which, although not perfect, is a truly important development of intervention doctrine. Canada and other UN member states should be assisted in developing the intergovernmental processes necessary to promote and put into effect the key concepts of the ICISS report within the UN system as soon as realistically possible. This framework does not necessarily open the door to an increase in interventions—each situation will still need to be considered on a case-by-case basis—but it does provide the international community with the guidelines necessary to respond quickly to each crisis as it arises.

However, it goes without saying that more emphasis should be placed on preventing humanitarian crises from arising in the first place. Progressive and radical work should be undertaken on the world’s responsibility to prevent (as well as the responsibility to rebuild after a conflict) by addressing the root causes of conflict, poverty and human insecurity. These root causes include, for example, the international arms market, the spread of HIV/AIDS, the overexploitation of natural resources, global climate change, state terror, the consequences of the structural adjustment policies of the International Monetary Fund, and the unjust world trade system. If preventive efforts in these areas are to be undertaken within the United Nations, then the organisation should rapidly address the growing problem of the poor quality of information and analysis available to the Security Council. A review carried out by the Disarmament Times in 2004 found that UN reports “characteristically gloss over or ignore key issues, and provide little or no analysis of the interplay of major economic and political interests that lies at the root of conflicts”.¹⁴ The review concludes that this is because the UN Secretariat does not wish to offend powerful states, including the permanent members of the Security Council. But this is a problem that must be addressed if the United Nations is to play its part in the international community’s responsibility to prevent humanitarian crises.

Sovereignty needs to be protected, particularly in the developing and post-colonial world and particularly in the face of Western economic, political, cultural and military imperialism. However, states have a responsibility to protect their citizens, and the international community has a duty, not a right, to intercede when those citizens are genuinely suffering gross violations of their fundamental human rights. The ICISS report provides a suitable framework for genuinely humanitarian interventions, but they must be carried out with the authority of the United Nations and, ideally, with troops coming under UN command. For this to work, the United Nations will need to go through a difficult and profound process of change, in order to adapt to the security problems of the twenty-first century. In addition, the use of vetoes in the Security Council should be revised, and more power given to the General Assembly and the Uniting for Peace procedures, so that the United Nations can respond effectively to developing emergencies.

Many of the issues discussed in this paper were addressed at the end of 2004 in the report of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change.¹⁵ The report identifies violence within states (including civil wars, large-scale human rights abuses and genocide) as one of six clusters of threat with which the United Nations and the world must be concerned in the coming decades. The responsibility to protect civilians from large-scale violence is a central theme of the report, and the High-Level Panel incorporated “responsibility to protect” principles into several of its key recommendations. The panel affirmed the core argument of the ICISS report, namely, that with state sovereignty comes the responsibility to protect the welfare of citizens, and that the international community has a responsibility to protect those peoples whose states are unable or unwilling to do so. In particular, the panel recommended that the basic criteria of legitimacy (last resort, proportional means, etc.) set out by ICISS be met by the Security Council in authorising any use of military force. The panel also reiterated ICISS’s emphasis on conflict prevention and post-conflict reconstruction.

Although the whole international community needs to engage with these issues, the UK government is of particular importance. Tony Blair has expressed a specific interest in the issue of humanitarian intervention, particularly in his “doctrine of the international community” speech discussed earlier. The UK foreign secretary, Jack Straw, also spoke on these issues at Chatham House in September 2004. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the United Kingdom is well placed to influence the discussion on humanitarian intervention and to support Canada in promoting ICISS’s work. Moreover, in 2005 the United Kingdom will hold the rotating presidency of both the European Union and the G8 group of leading industrialised countries, putting it in a position to forward the humanitarian intervention issue within these organisations as well.

While the political will to establish a UN standing army does not exist, further attention could be given to the role that regional or sub-regional organisations (for example, the African Union or European Union) might play in rapid troop deployment, particularly if the Security Council and General Assembly fail to respond to an emerging humanitarian crisis. There also needs to be serious examination of the worrying possibility that the United Nations might make greater use of private military companies (as somewhat unaccountable non-state actors) in future military interventions, peacekeeping operations and post-conflict reconstruction. This is important, as it concerns the means used for intervention—in other words, not just if or when should we intervene, but how should we intervene?

In addition, member states must stop crippling the United Nations (for example, through the political use of vetoes or consistent failure to meet their financial obligations to the organisation) and then blaming the world body for inaction. The failure to intervene in Rwanda in 1994 is often seen as the United Nations’ most shameful moment. However, it was a lack of political will by key members of the Security Council (particularly the United States, along with Britain and France), as well as arguments over who would supply the resources and cover the cost of military action, which led to the failure to intervene in time. What followed was a preventable genocide and the loss of an estimated eight hundred thousand lives in three months. Although more than the sum of its parts, the United Nations is made up of its individual member states and they all have a responsibility to ensure it works effectively.

Military intervention on asserted humanitarian grounds, without the consent of the targeted state, should be used with extreme caution. But more importantly, perhaps, there must never be another Rwanda or Darfur. We must now begin to move from rhetoric to reality.

1. Heidi Hulan, “Canadian Non-Paper on The Responsibility to Protect and the Evolution of the United Nations’ Peace and Security Mandate” (submission to the UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, April 2004), p. 1.