This article questions whether international intervention in the name of human rights can actually resolve conflicts and ensure peace, addressing the debate about the importance of state sovereignty and international order, and the success of intervention.
When individual states seek to assert their claims in the name of human rights, the issues at stake are never able to find a compromise, because if something is said only in the context of human rights, the dispute around it is ultimately perceived as non-negotiable. If one side says that its claims are in accordance with human rights, it will only lead to extreme confrontation with the other side that disagrees. This is especially true among countries with different cultural and religious backgrounds. With each country having its own value system, it is difficult to apply the universal concept of human rights consistently.
Human rights can provide a common framework for conflicting parties to discuss, but it is an illusion to think that human rights can resolve all conflicts because they trump any other value. Not only the means and methods to ensure human rights, but also the content of human rights themselves are bound to be the result of political compromise. In this sense, human rights are politics. It is inevitable that political interests will influence the definition and interpretation of human rights, which further complicates matters in the international community.
A transnational legal order is emerging, but it is utopian to expect an era beyond state sovereignty. State sovereignty should not be seen as an outdated principle that will disappear in the age of globalization. At the very least, we need to recognize that state sovereignty is the foundation of the international order and that national constitutional systems are the best bulwark of human rights. This view will be unfamiliar and controversial to human rights advocates, who for the past 50 years have viewed the state as the greatest danger to individual human rights. But today, the main threats to human rights do not come only from tyranny, but also from civil war and anarchy. So we are rediscovering the need for state order as a bulwark of human rights: that civil liberties are better guaranteed by citizens’ own institutions than by well-meaning external intervention.
What if all order in a country has disintegrated and its citizens are in a state of war of all against all, or if the state is committing horrific, repeated, and systematic violence against its citizens? The best way to protect human rights in these situations is through direct intervention, ranging from imposing various sanctions to using military force. And the discourse that justifies these interventions is the protection of human rights. But if you look at the interventions we’ve done since the end of the Cold War, who can say that they’ve been successful? The intervention in Bosnia didn’t create a stable, autonomous society; it just paused the ethnic civil war that was going on. We have failed to embed a culture of human rights into shared institutions. Rather than strengthening respect for human rights, these interventions are undermining their legitimacy. Because our interventions have been neither successful nor consistent, they are not solving the problem, nor is inaction.
Historically, when the international community has intervened in the name of protecting human rights, it has often failed to achieve the expected results. This stems from a disconnect between the rationale for intervention and its actual goals, revealing that the ideal of protecting human rights can sometimes be distorted by political and economic interests. Furthermore, in order for an intervention to be legitimate, its objectives and methods must be widely agreed upon by the international community, which remains an unresolved challenge.
If the use of military force is an inevitable component of human rights protection, the question is whether the current international regime, which is set up to make intervention impossible, should be changed. Most weak states believe that if the right to intervene is formalized in any form, it will eventually erode not only the sovereignty of the state that abuses human rights, but also that of the state that protects them. However, advocates of intervention believe that the international system needs to document what it actually already tolerates. In other words, if a country’s human rights record threatens international peace and security, they argue that the Security Council should have the authority to take escalating measures of coercion, ranging from various forms of sanctions to full-scale military intervention. As a result, it is unlikely that an international consensus on humanitarian intervention can be achieved within the current institutional framework of the United Nations.
