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The United Nations dossier

‘We the peoples’, not the states

by Nuri Albala 

THE United Nations system is founded on the principle of sovereignty, designed to maintain peace in the world by protecting states from foreign intervention. So how did such a peculiar and questionable idea as the right of humanitarian intervention emerge within that system? It happened step by step. In the 1960s human rights advocates argued that the rules defining foreign intervention as an illegal violation of sovereignty did not apply to them, because they related only to relations between states. Later, instead of denying that their actions violated sovereignty, humanitarian organisations began to justify their interventions in foreign countries on the basis of their motives, grounded in the principles of human rights. It was not long before some began to claim that this motive-based rationale could also be applied to states.

On 8 December 1988 the UN General Assembly passed a resolution that it regarded as a limited, prudent measure to reduce pressure in this controversial matter. Resolution 43/131, “Humanitarian assistance to victims of natural disasters and similar emergency situations”, authorised NGOs and intergovernmental organisations to intervene in a humanitarian capacity. Single states were not granted this right of intervention but, in practice, powerful countries - those with the resources to mount a large-scale intervention - have used it amply. In the former Yugoslavia and in Iraq (in 1990-91), they were able to charge in with UN backing (1).

After the Dayton accords in the former Yugoslavia (2), the UN Security Council put Nato in charge of peacekeeping, the purpose for which the UN had been created. The Peace Implementation Forces were placed under Nato command, in blatant violation of article 53 of the UN charter. In this way, the supposed right of intervention, in practice available only to the most powerful states, ended as just an acceptable modern disguise for the old-style imperialism it reintroduced.

Yet the people of the South, (...)

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Nuri Albala

Translated by Gulliver Cragg

(1) See UN Resolution 1511. The first Gulf war (1990-91) was not justified on humanitarian grounds, but as a response to Iraq’s violation of Kuwaiti sovereignty.

(2) On 21 November 1995 at the US base at Dayton, Ohio, the presidents of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia signed an agreement that maintained Bosnia-Herzegovina’s recognised borders while dividing it into two entities, a Serbian republic and a Muslim-Croat federation.


(4) Declaration of the Rights of Man, 1789, Article 3.

(5) Likewise the Inter-Allied Declaration signed in London on 12 June 1941.

(6) See NGO status at the UN.

(7) See Crépeau, introduction to Mondialisation des échanges et fonctions de l’Etat, Bruylant, Brussels, 1997.

See also

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