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Abstract

Humanitarian interventions are a military tool for the purpose of stopping an ongoing genocide or crime against humanity, and they present a (shaky) legal alternative to the traditional United Nations Security Council resolution for the use of force. Although their legal authority is not formally cemented in international law, there is a growing acceptance of humanitarian interventions among both the international community and scholars for their ability to stop the worst crimes against humanity. However, that growing legitimacy is a double-edged sword because those shaky legal foundations can— and have—been misused by insincere actors, with Russia being the clearest example. This Note assumes a normative perspective that humanitarian interventions, at their best, are good and should be protected from the misuse of states trying to justify their otherwise illegal use of force.

In the Introduction, I give an overview of the context of humanitarian interventions. In Part I, I summarize the legal foundations for the traditional use of force and for humanitarian interventions. In Part II, I give three case examples of the use of humanitarian justifications for the use of force including: India’s intervention in Bangladesh, NATO’s intervention in Yugoslavia, and Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. Finally, in Part III, I present a proposed solution to this problem of misuse. The proposed solution will include (1) allowing the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”) to adjudicate the legality of a humanitarian intervention, and (2) giving it a three-factor test to establish a framework that the ICJ may use in its adjudication. The three factors of the test include: (1) whether there exists a breach of the Genocide Convention; (2) whether the intervening state made a formal notification for its intervention; and (3) whether the intervention, from a reasonable observer, would result in a net-positive number of lives saved and not increase regional instability. For this test, if any of the three factors are not met, then the humanitarian justification is invalid.

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