The Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention - A Kneejerk Reaction

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Introduction

The end of the Cold War has heightened interest in issues of global justice, which have emerged as contenders with more conventional concerns such as power, order, and security. State sovereignty, once dominant in international relations and human development, has been challenged by human rights as the primary normative language.

The Challenge to State Sovereignty by Human Rights

Whether human rights are truly universal and applicable to all individuals and societies has emerged in the wake of the tensions between state sovereignty and human rights, which have been amplified since the 1990s due to the rise of humanitarian interventions. This raises the question of whether such interventions can truly be considered humanitarian.

Traditionally, international politics have been viewed through the lens of collective groups, particularly states, with individual interests and needs subordinated to the national interest. Nonetheless, the government's role in protecting and promoting human rights is critical because it confers on its significant obligations that affect both its foreign and domestic policies, given that human rights are both universal and fundamental.

The Emergence of Cosmopolitan Sensibilities

With the emergence of cosmopolitan sensibilities, human rights discourse has transcended national boundaries and expanded its purview beyond the confines of the state. Human rights are now regarded as a universal demand for all members of the human family.

The Role of United Nation in Protecting Human Rights

The United Nations (UN), in its early years, focused primarily on formulating norms and standards about human rights until the mid-1960s, after which it shifted its emphasis to implementation. The cosmopolitan implications of human rights are discernible not only in efforts to employ international law, which typically constitutes "soft" law, to establish benchmarks for state conduct but also in endeavors to reinforce regional and global governance, which could potentially constrain or redefine the nature of state sovereignty. Despite the growing strength of human rights law and the heightened interest in cosmopolitan and human rights discourses, the theoretical implications of human rights are balanced against formidable practical and occasionally moral considerations.

The central difficulty in protecting human rights is that states are the sole entities capable of promoting them, while simultaneously being the chief perpetrators of human rights violations. However, the notion of an inevitable conflict between human rights and state sovereignty is misleading, as state sovereignty typically overrides human rights considerations. Regarding the United States, its commitment to human rights and humanitarian law has been seriously called into question due to its handling of the war on terror.

The preservation of human rights is particularly challenging in times of conflict. The United Nations, hampered by power politics among its permanent members, often struggles to adopt a definitive stance on such matters.

Human Rights and the War on Terror

The Rwandan genocide, a tragic event that saw the killing of an estimated 800,000 primarily Tutsi ethnic group members and some moderate Hutus, serves as an example. Since the 1990s, greater emphasis has been placed on extending international law to ensure that individuals responsible for gross human rights violations involving genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes are held accountable.

However, interventions pose a fundamental problem as they may do more harm than good. The removal of dictators and their replacement with foreign occupying forces may exacerbate tensions and increase the risk of civil war, resulting in a state of near-constant warfare that subjects civilians to significant harm.

Humanitarian intervention contends that it frequently engenders inadvertent outcomes such as exacerbation of violence and erosion of sovereignty and international law. They posit that military intervention can be employed as a guise to advance national interests, rather than safeguarding human rights and that it is arduous to ascertain the precise juncture when intervention is indispensable and fitting.

Written by Riya Sharma