Rights by Campbell Tom;

Author:Campbell, Tom;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2006-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Human rights intervention

By this stage in our journey it is clear that we cannot hope to arrive at a list of human rights, together with their correlative duties, that applies in all contexts and can be used for all purposes and in conjunction with all remedies that human rights discourse does and could serve and utilise. Indeed, it is often destructive of these aims if we do not seek to specify in appropriate detail the rights that we seek to prioritise for particular purposes and mechanisms of application. Clear statements of rights, duties and remedies that are context specific are essential prerequisites for protecting and furthering the human interests involved.

The very same events that have prompted the founding of the International Criminal Court raise the issue of when the UN or individual states should take steps to protect people against their own governments or the results of domestic lawlessness. Telling examples of this arise from a number of recent interventions in the internal affairs of states on human rights grounds. The lamentably late UN intervention in Rwanda after genocidal massacres had taken place between Tutsi and Hutu tribes during 1994 and 1995, and the scarcely more timely response to the ethic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia between Moslem and Christian groups, were more or less legitimated through the UN on the grounds of human rights violations. Equally significant have been notorious failures to intervene to prevent the massacre of Kurds in Iraq, tribal groups in Uganda, the enemies of Pol Pot in Cambodia and non-Arabs in the Sudan.

These events have led people to ask whether there ought not to be more such actions to protect vulnerable people against their governments or those whom their government will not or cannot restrain. What of systematic starvation through maladministration and corruption? What of governments that use torture or permit multinational companies to destroy the traditional means of subsistence for large numbers of their poor citizens? (Moore 1997, Chatterjee and Scheid 2003).

Here what is at stake is not the rights but the duties of interventionist states, with or without the authorisation of the UN. Do the rights-protection duties of states extend beyond their own borders and to persons other than their own nationals? Clearly that is the case with respect to their negative duties, to refrain from violating the human rights of anyone, but does it extend to positive duties, including duties to prevent third parties injuring their own nationals? Given the fuzziness and frequent irrelevance of the distinction between negative and positive duties in national communities, it is difficult to accept that it marks a definitive bright line in international affairs. If we take seriously our humanitarian concerns for the wellbeing of all members of the human race, it does not make sense to limit our obligations to those with whom we happen to share common citizenship. To do so can be seen as an example of collective selfishness on the part of those able to intervene to protect those less fortunate than themselves.

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