Title: Review Essay 'Paved with Good Intentions ...' - Humanitarian War, the New Interventionism and Legal Regulation of the Use of Force
Abstract:The legal regulation of the use of force continues to be an area where the line between legal reasoning and audacious legitimation is frequently blurred. There persists, it seems, a role for internati...The legal regulation of the use of force continues to be an area where the line between legal reasoning and audacious legitimation is frequently blurred. There persists, it seems, a role for international lawyers in subtly vindicating raison dýtat (reason of state) by elaborating latter-day versions of a to punish. The United States' 1989 invasion of Panama - an unambiguous violation of the UN Charter and condemned by all other members of the Organization of American States - is thus defended as a lawful response to tyranny based on a putative to unilateral pro-democratic intervention. Similarly, the maintenance of aerial exclusion (no-fly) zones over northern and southern Iraq by the United States and the United Kingdom, and air strikes in punishment for failing to comply with a weapons-inspection regime, are claimed to be impliedly authorised by the United Nations Security Council, although no express wording is to be found in any relevant resolution. In light of this historical context, the heralding by some international lawyers of a new of humanitarian in the aftermath of the use of force against the former Republic of Yugoslavia by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) should be approached with caution. Some writers, such as Michael Glennon, abandon any pretence of legal analysis and instead laud America's new willingness to do what it thinks - international law notwithstanding. Dr Chesterman's new work is a useful corrective to those who would cheerily dissolve the distinction between legality and power, or between legal analysis and agitprop. While the book is subtitled Humanitarian Intervention and International Law, its scope is considerably broader than a discussion of any purported customary international law to use unilateral force to prevent a humanitarian or human rights catastrophe. It treats carefully the question of whether a to humanitarian intervention pre-existed the UN Charter, or has crystallised subsequently, but also devotes considerable space to the new legal modalities of the use of force that have emerged in the last 15 years. The latter developments, beginning after the end of the Cold War, have introduced new dimensions into the practice of the Security Council, and portend an unsettling new topography in which the Security Council's supreme authority over non-defensive uses of force is by turns either co-opted or ignored. At the core of Dr Chesterman's book is the unfashionable contention that the collective security framework of the UN Charter should be defended, precisely because it seems ultimately more likely to preserve a thin rule of law in international affairs than any right of unilateral intervention wielded selectively by powerful states.Read More
Publication Year: 2001
Publication Date: 2001-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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