Humanitarian intervention


Humanitarian intervention is the use or threat of military force by a state across borders with the intent of ending severe and widespread human rights violations in a state which has not given permission for the use of force. Humanitarian interventions are aimed at ending human rights violations of individuals other than the citizens of the intervening state. Humanitarian interventions are only intended to prevent human rights violations in extreme circumstances. Attempts to establish institutions and political systems to achieve positive outcomes in the medium- to long-run, such as peacekeeping, peace-building and development aid, do not fall under this definition of a humanitarian intervention.
There is not one standard or legal definition of humanitarian intervention; the field of analysis often influences the definition that is chosen. Differences in definition include variations in whether humanitarian intervention is limited to instances where there is an absence of consent from the host state; whether humanitarian intervention is limited to punishment actions; and whether humanitarian intervention is limited to cases where there has been explicit UN Security Council authorization for action. Nonetheless, there is a general consensus on some of its essential characteristics:
  1. Humanitarian intervention involves the threat and use of military forces as a central feature
  2. It is an intervention in the sense that it entails interfering in the internal affairs of a state by sending military forces into the territory or airspace of a sovereign state that has not committed an act of aggression against another state.
  3. The intervention is in response to situations that do not necessarily pose direct threats to states' strategic interests, but instead is motivated by humanitarian objectives.
The customary international law concept of humanitarian intervention dates back to Hugo Grotius and the European politics in the 17th century. However, that customary law has been superseded by the UN Charter, which prohibits the use of force in international relations, subject to two exhaustive exceptions: UN Security Council action taken under Chapter VII, and self-defence against an armed attack. The type and frequency of humanitarian interventions have changed drastically since the 19th century, with a massive increase in humanitarian interventions since the end of the Cold War. Historically, humanitarian interventions were limited to rescuing one's own citizens in other states or to rescue ethnically or religiously similar groups. Over the course of the 20th century, subjects perceived worthy of humanitarian intervention expanded beyond religiously and ethnically similar groups to encompass all peoples.
The subject of humanitarian intervention has remained a compelling foreign policy issue, especially since NATO's intervention in Kosovo in 1999, as it highlights the tension between the principle of state sovereignty – a defining pillar of the UN system and international law – and evolving international norms related to human rights and the use of force. The legal justification for this kind of humanitarian intervention, remains extremely controversial, particularly after the United States' claim that its invasion of Iraq qualified as a humanitarian intervention. Moreover, it has sparked normative and empirical debates over its legality, the ethics of using military force to respond to human rights violations, when it should occur, who should intervene, and whether it is effective. To its proponents, it marks imperative action in the face of human rights abuses, over the rights of state sovereignty, while to its detractors it is often viewed as a pretext for military intervention often devoid of legal sanction selectively deployed and achieving only ambiguous ends. Its frequent use following the end of the Cold War suggested to many that a new norm of military humanitarian intervention was emerging in international politics, although some now argue that the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the US "war on terror" have brought the era of humanitarian intervention to an end.

History

Getting involved in the affairs of another state on humanitarian grounds has been a subject of discussion in public international law since the 19th century.
According to Jonathan Friedman and Paul James, explicit assertions about humanitarian motives are not a new phenomenon and military action is instead often rationalized through such moral rather than political arguments. As a pretext for deploying troops in Italian Somaliland and Italian Eritrea for an intended invasion of Ethiopia, Benito Mussolini thus claimed that he was attempting to both secure the Wal Wal border area where some Italian soldiers had been killed and abolish the local slave trade. Similarly, Adolf Hitler justified his own forces' occupation of the Sudetenland by suggesting that they were attempting to quash ethnic tensions in Czechoslovakia.
File:George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron by Richard Westall.jpg|thumb|upright|Poet Lord Byron, a Philhellene who fought for Greek independence.
Possibly the first historical example of a state expressly intervening in the internal affairs of another on the grounds of humanitarian concern was during the Greek War of Independence in the early 19th century, when Britain, France and Russia decisively intervened in a naval engagement at Navarino in 1827 to secure for the Greeks independence from the Ottoman Empire.
Popular opinion in England was sympathetic to the Greeks, in part due to the Greek origin of the West's classical heritage. The renowned poet Lord Byron even took up arms to join the Greek revolutionaries, while the London Philhellenic Committee was established to aid the Greek insurgents financially.
In 1823, after initial ambivalence, the Foreign Secretary George Canning declared that "when a whole nation revolts against its conqueror, the nation cannot be considered as piratical but as a nation in a state of war". In February that same year, he notified the Ottoman Empire that the United Kingdom would maintain friendly relations with the Turks only under the condition that the latter respected the Christian subjects of the Empire. He was also instrumental in the outcome of the St. Petersburg Protocol 1826, in which Russia and Britain agreed to mediate between the Ottomans and the Greeks on the basis of complete autonomy of Greece under Turkish sovereignty. When this did not end the War, Canning negotiated a following treaty that ultimately led to the destruction of the Egyptian-Turkish fleet at the Battle of Navarino.
File:French Expedition in Syria, The Times, Thursday, Aug 09, 1860.png|thumb|left|The 1860 French Expedition to intervene in the Druze–Maronite conflict was described by The Times as stemming from humanitarian motives.
The treatment of minorities under the Ottoman aegis proved a rich source of liberal agitation throughout the nineteenth century. A multinational force under French leadership was sent to Lebanon to help restore peace after the 1860 Druze–Maronite conflict, in which thousands of Christian Maronites had been massacred by the Druze population. Following an international outcry, the Ottoman Empire agreed on 3 August 1860 to the dispatch of up to 12,000 European soldiers to reestablish order. This agreement was further formalized in a convention on 5 September 1860 with Austria, Great Britain, France, Prussia and Russia.
In May 1876 Ottoman troops began massacring unarmed agitators for autonomy in Bulgaria, leading to the Eastern Crisis. The British launched a government investigation into the events, which confirmed that as part of an official policy, the Turks had killed at least 12,000 Bulgarians and obliterated about 60 villages. Lurid reports began to appear in newspapers, especially accounts by the investigative journalist William Thomas Stead in the Northern Echo, and protest meetings were called across the country.
Despite the unprecedented demonstration of the strength of public opinion and the media, the Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli remained an unmoved practitioner of realpolitik, and considered British interests to lie in the preservation of Ottoman sovereignty in Eastern Europe. Lord Derby the Foreign Secretary disagreed and telegraphed the Sublime Porte that "any renewal of the outrages would be more fatal to the Porte than the loss of a battle." Apart from issuing stern advice and proposals for internal Turkish reform and the legal protection of minorities, the Disraeli government did nothing. However, the issue convulsed British politics with former Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone coming out of retirement to campaign over the atrocities. In a famous campaigning speech he said:
Let the Turks now carry away their abuses, in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Blmhashis and Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province that they have desolated and profaned. This thorough riddance, this most blessed deliverance, is the only reparation we can make to those heaps and heaps of dead, the violated purity alike of matron and of maiden and of child; to the civilization which has been affronted and shamed; to the laws of God, or, if you like, of Allah; to the moral sense of mankind at large.

Rising Great Power tensions in the early 20th century and the interwar period led to a breakdown in the concerted will of the international community to enforce considerations of a humanitarian nature. Attempts were made under the auspices of the League of Nations to arbitrate and settle international disputes. Aggressive actions, such as the Italian Invasion of Abyssinia and the Japanese occupation of Manchuria were condemned, but the League lacked the resolve to enforce its will effectively. The Allied discovery of the Holocaust and the subsequent Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II caused attitudes to change considerably. After the tragedies in Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s, the international community began to debate how to react to cases in which human rights are grossly and systematically violated. Especially, in his Millennium Report of 2000, then Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan, called on Member States: "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?". Since the end of the Cold War, interventions have increasingly been used, such as the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and the 2011 military intervention in Libya.