CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

The UN formally considered the case for adapting the existing stay on preventive action
in the Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. The
panel’s conclusion was set firmly against any doctrine of unilateral preventive action:
(I)f there are good arguments for preventive military action, with good evidence
to support them, they should be put to the Security Council, which can authorize
such action if it chooses to. If it does not so choose, there will be, by definition,
time to pursue other strategies, including persuasion, negotiation, deterrence and
containment — and to visit again the military option.
For those impatient with such a response, the answer must be that, in a world
full of perceived potential threats, the risk to the global order and the norm of
non - intervention on which it continues to be based is simply too great for the
legality of unilateral preventive action, as distinct from collectively endorsed
action, to be accepted. Allowing one to so act is to allow all. 211
The Panel’s conclusion was that the Security Council, in considering whether to
authorize use of force, should consider, at least, the following five criteria: Seriousness
of threat; proper purpose; last resort; proportional means; and balance of consequences.
In other word, it endorsed just war doctrine as the continued framework for debate.
Again, as with intervention, it may be the case that a state or group of states feels the
situation is such that they cannot seek authority or consensus in advance; or, indeed, the
extraneous factors that impact on the decision making process of the Security Council
may be thought such that the formal expression of international consensus represented
by its authority is simply beyond what can be achieved. In such cases a state or group
of states may feel compelled to act unilaterally. Nevertheless, for all the reasons
explained in Chapter 2, they would be well advised to be certain that their use of force
can be justified at least retrospectively; that it will be viewed across a wide spectrum of
international opinion to have been legitimate even if, strictly, illegal (to borrow the
conclusion of the International Kosovo Commission). What is required is that any act
of pre-emption can pass what US Presidential candidate John Kerry termed the ‘global
test’(see p117) * .
* Republicans seized on the term to suggest Kerry would cede US defence to international veto; he then
denied that by ‘global’ he had meant ‘international’.
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