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May 9, 2008
The Burmese junta's refusal of international humanitarian aid in response to Cyclone Nargis is, the UN laments, “unprecedented”. When is it right for nation states to intervene?
In a 2003 speech Gareth Evans, President, International Crisis Group and Co-Chair, International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty,says:
If the European Union countries are at one end of the kind of spectrum of states that have been prepared to embrace a whole variety of limitations and constraints on their sovereignty, and to move away from the traditional nationalist position that has occupied states responses and reactions and behaviour with each other for so many centuries, if the European Union is at one end of that extreme, I think it is fair to say that the Asian countries are really still at the other, with interstate rivalry, a rather fierce consciousness of national identity, very strong nationalism, very strong unwillingness to embrace any kind of limitations on sovereignty, that is very much the environment we are operating in.
The United Nations has said that it has a 'responsibility to protect' the civilians victims of crimes against humanity regardless of whether sovereign governments wanted them to or not. The appeal is to the “right to intervene” in catastrophic situations, accepted by the General Assembly in the 1990s.
Can governments intervene? Can they override the principle of national sovereignty----that what happens within state borders, however grotesque and morally indefensible, is basically nobody else’s business----in the name of international law? Evans observes:
in 1999 and 2000 there were major debates in the General Assembly on this issue of the so-called humanitarian intervention with absolutely no consensus being evident at all in what the appropriate response should be, a very big division opening up between those states, mainly western on the one hand, who are arguing the case, at least in principle, for more robust intervention when certain criteria were satisfied; and a number of other states, mainly from the developing world being acutely sensitive about the issue of sovereignty invasion thus involved, and being very unwilling to acknowledge any general principles at all that should apply in this area.
There are precedents Governments had the approval neither of Saddam Hussein nor the Security Council in 1991, when they airlifted aid to fleeing Kurds in northern Iraq. The idea that states can do what they please within their borders has been modified since 1945 by a growing acceptance that states have responsibilities as well as rights, and that gross violations of those responsibilities are an international concern. The right of states to intervene militarily in the event of a humanitarian catastrophe has emerged in the wake of the actions in Kosovo and in East Timor in 1999.
These two events pointed to a growing consensus in international law that a right to intervene to prevent serious human rights abuses is emerging. With the "responsibility to protect" comes the idea that sovereignty can, in some circumstances, be breached when a State fails in the duty to its people. In 2006, the "responsibility to protect" notion was adopted by the UN Security Council.
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