There is no denying that international human rights norms are enforced selectively. Some oppressive governments become the targets of military intervention, while the political sovereignty of other, equally oppressive regimes is left intact. The moral disapproval that this has been known to evoke takes two distinct forms. For some, the interventions make the non-interventions particularly offensive. When former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali expressed outrage at the contrasting international responses to the crises in Yugoslavia and Somalia in the early 1990s, his objection was not that the Bosniaks were receiving help from the outside world, but that the Somalis were not thought worthy of the same. For others, it is the interventions that do occur that are morally tainted; selectivity is advanced as a reason to condemn a particular humanitarian operation. Not surprisingly this objection is common amongst the states singled out for intervention and their apologists, but the intuition behind it is more widely shared.

My aim in this chapter is to determine whether a humanitarian intervention can possibly be made illegitimate by the fact that the state prosecuting it has failed, is failing, or will fail to defend human rights under relevantly similar circumstances elsewhere. I will consider three distinct arguments for an affirmative answer:

1. the international covenants and treaties which oblige states to honour human rights standards are annulled by selective enforcement;

2. a state’s non-interventions make its interventions ‘comparatively unjust’ (or unfair);

3. non-intervention in X delegitimises intervention in Y if the non-intervention constitutes a dereliction of duty, and is a foreseeable consequence of the intervention.