Legal

Director

Moderator

Vice-Chair

TOPIC PREVIEW: LEGALITY OF HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION - Loosely, humanitarian intervention can be explained as the interference in one state by another (or more) states or international organizations in order to prevent, end, or reduce the violation of the human rights of a population within that other state. The concept of humanitarian intervention is based upon the idea that preventing human suffering sometimes necessitates the ignoring of normal standards of state sovereignty, or, put in another way, that respect for a nation’s sovereignty depends upon that nation’s respect for standards of human rights. While The United Nations Charter explicitly protects state sovereignty and guarantees the non-interference in a state’s domestic jurisdiction and affairs, documents such as the Universal Declaration for Human Rights, proclaimed by the UN General Assembly guarantee basic human rights for all people. Likewise, the Security Council has responded to humanitarian crises, in some cases those contained within a single country. This intervention, however, has been inconsistent. Although the UN Charter states that “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” many nations have also engaged in unilateral intervention, without Security Council approval, as with NATO’s involvement in Kosovo in 1999. This is clearly an area where the international policy is thorny if contradictory, and where many different precedents have been set. It will be the job of the Legal committee to negotiate through these thorny issues, and address the question of how we define "Just Humanitarian Intervention," with attention to concerns of proportionality, discrimination, and sovereignty, and means of warfare and intervention.