Introduction

There is nothing inherently new, or redoubtably extraordinary, in the proposition that States should shoulder the responsibility to protect their own people. Nor is it indeed a groundbreaking discovery that other States choose not to stand idly by while a State decimates its own citizens. If we exclude the travestied interpretation of sovereignty – which, for some States, seems to imply that a State is at liberty to wreak havoc on its own people – the very notion of sovereignty implies that a State bears an almost sacrosanct responsibility to protect its people against all forms of evils, including those that may originate from within the State itself, even if inadvertently.

It is when a State fails to discharge this responsibility, and the United Nations Security Council's (SC’s) administered collective security under Chapter VII of the Charter fails to rescue the situation, that another State, or a group of States, acting as a deus ex machina, intervene to halt or prevent the wanton destruction of lives and property occurring in the State concerned. ‘States playing God’ (an inexact approximation of the Greek aphorism deus ex machina – ‘god out of machine’) is one way of looking at humanitarian intervention, especially since it is up to those States to decide for themselves that the human suffering in the target State has reached a level deemed unacceptable by any civilisation to warrant their intervention.

Humanitarian intervention has never been free from controversy, and for good reasons too. While some incidents of what were arguably humanitarian intervention – such as Tanzania's disposal of the murderous Idi Amin's regime in Uganda in 1979 – present isolated instances of persuasiveness, the vast majority of humanitarian interventions can be readily passed off as a shield for meddlesomeness, and are often regarded by most developing countries as an imperialistic tool in the hands of powerful but canny users.

In recent times – precisely since the raucous, blatant aerial invasion of Yugoslav forces by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in Kosovo – the controversy about the legality of humanitarian intervention had somewhat abated. The hope for a revival of that debate, following Serbia's case against 10 NATO States before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), was dashed by the fact that the Alliance did not to plead humanitarian intervention as a justification for the 1999 action.