CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

scene for deliberations that followed that intervention, John P Humphries summarised
the historical situation thus:
What a state did to (its nationals) was its own business and beyond the reach of
international law … (but) there may have been an exception to the rule. If … a
State treated its nationals in such a manner as to shock the conscience of
mankind, other states could intervene, if necessary by force … This was called
humanitarian intervention. There were a number of such interventions,
particularly in the nineteenth century; but, partly because most if not all of them
were motivated by political considerations that had nothing to do with human
rights, it is questionable whether so-called humanitarian intervention was ever
recognised as an institution of the law of nations. 53
So, considerations of the need to intervene contrary to the proscription of the UN
Charter, is not as new as might be supposed. Nevertheless, the end of the Cold War saw
a coincidence of an emerging consciousness of individual rights, a geo-strategic
environment much more amenable than erstwhile to military intervention, with a
renewed outbreak of internal strife not only in those places where it was endemic but
also, perhaps most importantly, in the Balkans – the West’s ‘backyard’. Geographic
proximity coupled with blanket media coverage, gave the conflict and especially the
atrocities of the Balkans an immediacy that the West could no longer ignore.
Already in 1991, anticipating the mood-change and in the light of the first true act of
successful collective defence under UN auspices, then UN Secretary General Javier
Perez de Cuellar argued that there had been a ‘shift in public attitudes towards the belief
that the defence of the oppressed in the name of morality should prevail over frontiers
and legal documents’. 54 (and see p97).
The theme was continued by de Cuellar’s successor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali who called
into question the absoluteness of state sovereignty in his Agenda for Peace 55 :
Respect for (the State’s) fundamental sovereignty and integrity are crucial to any
common international progress. The time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty,
however, has passed; … It is the task of leaders of States today to understand
this and to find a balance between the needs of good internal governance and the
requirements of an ever more interdependent world. … ….
The sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of States within the
established international system, and the principle of self-determination for
peoples, both of great value and importance, must not be permitted to work
against each other in the period ahead.
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