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The Pros And Cons Of A Humanitarian Military Intervention

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A key reason why humanitarian military intervention is justified is because states do not have the right to do what they want to their own citizens. In 1948 the United Nations General Assembly stated that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a ‘common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations’ (United Nations, 1948). Therefore, once a state fails to uphold these standards, it should no longer be protected by international law and the transgression becomes a matter for the international community. For example, when Milosevic attempted to drive Kosovan Albanians out of the province in the late 1990s, NATO launched air strikes (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, 1999). Also, the introduction of the ‘Responsibility …show more content…

This is concerning as it gives greater freedom for countries to force certain values and norms upon other nation states. For example, in Asia, international law is seen to reflect Western values, such as ‘hedonistic individualism’, which fails to account for ‘Asian values’ (Koji, 2003). For example, in pursuit of rapid economic growth, Chinese citizens have had to sacrifice social rights. They have been forced to work in abhorrent conditions and have been victims of maltreatment (BBC News, …show more content…

For example, the point at which citizens are the victims of genocide states in the international community are morally entitled to use force to stop these atrocities (Walzer, 1978). For example, advocates of intervention question why there was not effective intervention on behalf of the international community in Rwanda in 1998 when genocide, causing the deaths of 800,000 people in 100 days, was a clear breach of the Geneva Convention (BBC News, 2011). Furthermore, natural law refers to the idea that humans, as an implication of their common humanity, have universal moral obligations. Joseph Boyle, a natural law theorist, argues that our moral responsibilities ‘are not limited to people with whom we are bound in community by contract, political ties, or common locale’ and therefore we must act to prevent human right abuses (Boyle, 1992,

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