In Chapter 3 I briefly introduced the ICISS report on The Responsibility to Protect (R2P). The document sets out a list of conditions that must be satisfied before armed intervention becomes a morally legitimate option. First, there must be ‘large scale loss of life’ or ethnic cleansing (the ‘just cause threshold’). These harms must be already occurring or ‘imminently likely to occur’. And the prudential constraints on war (last resort, proportionality, reasonable prospect of success) must all be satisfied. Henceforth I will refer to these simply as the ICISS threshold criteria.

According to this standard – which we have seen represents the dominant view on the subject – it is necessary to:

But we have also seen that not everyone agrees that a special set of ‘sovereignty-trumping’ rights needs to be set apart. Recall the cosmopolitan interventionists discussed in Chapter 1. According to Fernando Teson foreign intervention is justified, at least in principle, to protect any of the human rights ‘now recognised by international law’. In a similar vein Charles Beitz contends that there is no robust distinction between Rawls’ ‘human rights proper’ – to personal security, the means of subsistence, liberty from slavery and to equal treatment under the law – and the remainder of the rights that appear in the international legal lexicon. Therefore a state must honour the full complement of rights and liberties to enjoy the protection that sovereignty affords. It is not enough to merely refrain from massacre and ethnic cleansing.