History of Humanitarian Interventions

Among the early examples of humanitarian intervention noted, there was the intervention in Greece by
France and Britain in 1827 “in order to stop the shedding of blood and mischiefs by the Turks”; the
French and British intervention into the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1856; that of Syria by Britain,
France, Austria, Prussia and Russia following the massacre in 1860 of some six thousand Christian
Maronites by Syrian Druses; and the intervention of Crete (1866), Bosnia (1875), Bulgaria (1877) and
Macedonia (1887) against persecutions committed by the Turks by the European powers (Klob, 2003).

While in the early twentieth century the principles of non-intervention and sovereignty had already
gained sufficient importance, the legal status of humanitarian intervention was still quite vague (Hehir,
2010). Many wars justified to be humanitarian in character had been waged throughout the previous
century.

The League of Nations was born after the end of the First World War. The prime objective of the
organization was to prevent any large scale wars from taking place, which it had failed to do. Another
issue was that the organization has no punishment for states that broke the rules; should a state wage
war against another, the other member states had a duty to “protect” the attacked state, but only if
they themselves believed that the attacking state in fact was breaking the Covenants rules. However,
the inaction of the League on the face of Japan’s invasion on China in 1932 proved it’s ineffectively and
failure. Another problematic factor was that the rules only applied to member states of the Covenant,
thus making the non-member states immune. The Covenant, at the same time, failed to regard the
legality of the humanitarian interventions. This led to the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Hitler, and his
justification that it was to protect the lives of marginalized Germans in the country (Gisslén, 2018).

The Second World War began with the German invasion of Poland in 1939, which was evidence to the
failure of the League of Nations. The end of the war was marked by the replacement of the League by
the United Nations. This led to a process of drafting international law to prevent states from becoming
violent amongst each other and respect the principle of non-intervention and preservation of state
sovereignty. Human rights and protection of individuals were concepts that gained much attention, and
the attention of the international community drifted to the development of principles to preserve basic
human rights (Cassese, 2005). However, humanitarian intervention was not included in the UN Charter,
despite the increased stress on the human rights.

In the Millennium Report of 2000, Kofi Annan referred to the two most humanitarian disastrous failures
of the international community— Rwanda and Srebrenica—in order to counter the critiques of
humanitarian interventions. A controversy developed around the issues of responsibility to act and
protect, the role of the UN and the gaps in the international law. The 1999 intervention into Kosovo by
NATO exacerbated this debate. In December 2001, the Canadian government set up the International
Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) and came up with the concept of
‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) in response to the controversy. It was contested that sovereignty gave
responsibility to the state to protect their citizens, besides giving the right to control the affairs of their
own territory (Klose, 2015).

Henceforth, even after some continued debate, a new trend of humanitarian intervention heralded on
the basis of the concept of R2P. Currently, we see the military humanitarian intervention into Libya
(2011), the intervention against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levnant (ISIL) as striking examples of
successful interventions.
Reference

1. Cassese, A. (2005). International Law. New York: Oxford University Press, p.377.
2. Gisslén, M. (2018). Humanitarian Intervention in History - An Analysis of the Historical Evolution
of the Doctrine. [ebook] pp.15-17. Available at: http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?
func=downloadFile&recordOId=8941632&fileOId=8944420 [Accessed 14 Feb. 2019].
3. Hehir, A. (2013). Humanitarian intervention: An Introduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
p.189.
4. Klob, R. (2003). Note on humanitarian intervention. [ebook] International Committee of the Red
Cross, pp.120-123. Available at:
https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/assets/files/other/irrc_849_kolb.pdf [Accessed 14 Feb. 2019].
5. Klose, F. (2015). The Emergence of Humanitarian Intervention. Cambridge Core. Available at:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/emergence-of-humanitarian-intervention/emergence-
of-humanitarian-intervention/C206594BDC52B55DA3DBE59CBC82DB42/core-reader#
[Accessed 14 Feb. 2019].