Discuss the view that a "humanitarian intervention" reflects the interests of great powers rather than legal or moral principles.

Some corners argue that a right of unilateral intervention supersedes the Charter on account of consistent state practice of intervention over the centuries, which has created customary international law that precedes the UN Charter (Chesterman 2003: 45). Tesón, further, proffers that UNSC authorised actions themselves are “evidence of a customary international law norm sanctioning unilateral action” [1].

These arguments would suggest that there is a legal right to intervention even if such action does not meet with UNSC approval. If this is so, can one argue that unilateral humanitarian intervention by the great powers is driven by self-interest because states have at times chosen to bypass conventional legal routes in order to assert their own political will?

Would it not be equally valid to posit that the great powers are actually spearheading a new age of humanitarianism, circumventing the UNSC and the UN Charter only because these institutional safeguards have proved inadequate in the face of modern ethnic cleansing and similar human rights atrocities?

The 1990s saw a “fundamental change in the norms governing the behaviour of states” [2]. Until then, Cold War and anti-colonial international relations had ensured that the principle of non-intervention embodied in UN Charter Article 2(4) and dating back to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia was dominant in international affairs. During the 1990s an increasing number of interventions, from the creation of a safe haven in northern Iraq in 1991 to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, showed that military intervention in support of humanitarian goals had become widely accepted, perhaps due to an emerging global civil society [3].

Hand in hand with the increase in the number of humanitarian interventions, post-Cold War international politics witnessed a marked increase in focus on universal moral norms, arguably creating what Ignatieff refers to as a “moral imperium” [4].

“What do you do, what are you entitled to do, and what ought you to do if you repeatedly hear your neighbours beating their children?” [5] This question could usefully be transposed onto the issue of moral legitimacy of humanitarian intervention when asking when it is appropriate for states to intervene using force to protect the citizens of another state.

In some ways Gewirth's Principle of Intervening Action previously applied, albeit translated from the individual level to the state level: one state could not be held directly responsible for a violation if another state was the direct cause of that violation, thus absolving the first state of moral responsibility. However, where sovereignty has traditionally been held up as inviolable, states have begun to feel they can no longer turn a blind eye to their neighbour's actions, particularly in the wake of 9/11.