Human Rights and the Just War Tradition: Striving towards a framework of justification for humanitarian military interventions

Abstract

Genocides, civil wars and other humanitarian crises have led many to argue for humanitarian intervention as a responsibility of the international community to protect the interests of those whose states fail to do so; such arguments are often grounded in human rights. The aim of this thesis is to research the possibility of justifying a breach of sovereignty involving the use of military force on the basis of basic rights by embedding them into the just war framework. This framework consists of seven criteria that together formulate the conditions under which sovereignty can be justifiably overridden; the focus lies on the criteria of just cause, right intention and legitimate authority. It is considered whether human rights can realistically fulfill the just cause criterion; critics perceive human rights to provide a false sense of legitimacy for military operations, acting upon political or economic rather than humanitarian considerations. Therefore the role of intentions or motives for humanitarian interventions will be discussed. The hypothesis is that basic rights when embedded in the just war framework provide a feasible basis on which to justify military operations; to contemplate the realistic applicability of the theory the cases of humanitarian intervention in Somalia (1991-1995) and Rwanda (1994) will be discussed, resulting in the view that such a framework is feasible but points us towards the issue of a lack of credibly legitimate candidates to perform such interventions.