From humanitarian intervention to assassination: Human rights and political violence

Ethics

Volumn 118, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 228-257

  Altman, Andrew ^a   Wellman, Christopher Heath ^b,c  

^a GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^c CHARLES STURT UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 42549115390     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/526543     Document Type: Review

References (52)

1. Adapting Terry Nardin's definition, we understand intervention as the exercise of coercion by one state within the jurisdiction of another state, without the uncoerced permission of the government of the latter state. See his "Introduction," in NOMOS XLVII: Humanitarian Intervention, ed. Terry Nardin and Melissa Williams (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 1.
2. Our moral analyses are framed in terms of "human rights" because it is the most commonly accepted moral vocabulary for discussing state violence and, we believe, the best way to capture at the deepest level of moral thought the demands that derive from the moral status of persons. Thinkers whose foundational moral commitments are otherwise can still accept the arguments of this article as long as they can understand reference to human rights as grounded in, or a surrogate for, what they regard as the most basic moral demands connected to the status of personhood. On the question of what rights are human rights, our view is that the best place to start is with articles 3-20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, http://www.un.org/ Overview/rights.html.
3. International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001), 29-33.
4. Michael Blake, "Collateral Benefit," in Justice and Global Politics, ed. Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred Miller Jr., and Jeffrey Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 218-30, 226.
5. Michael Walzer, Arguing about War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 75.
6. Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 34.
7. Terry Nardin, "Humanitarian Imperialism: Response to 'Ending Tyranny in Iraq,'" Ethics and International Affairs 19 (2005): 21-26, 22.
8. Kenneth Roth, "War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention," Human Rights Watch Report (2004), available at http://hrw.org/wr2k4/3.htm.
9. North Korea might be an exception, because mass starvation seems to be part of its routine operation, at least during certain periods.
10. Walzer, Arguing about War, 80.
11. International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect, 53 and 55.
12. See ibid., 7-8 and 16; and Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 3rd ed. (New York: Basic, 2000), 86-91. Walzer's version of the argument is examined in Sec. III below.
13. Vaughn Lowe, "International Legal Issues Arising in the Kosovo Crisis," Memorandum to the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Commons (UK) (February 8, 2000) available at http://www.publications.parliament. uk/pa/cm199900/cmselect/cmfaff/28/0020805.htm.
14. The argument linking the protection of rights to internal legitimacy is elaborated at length in Andrew Altman and Christopher Heath Wellman, A Liberal Theory of International Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
15. Mirko Bagaric and John R. Morss, "Transforming Humanitarian Intervention from an Expedient Accident to a Categorical Imperative," Brooklyn Journal of International Law 30 (2005): 421-52, 439. These authors go further than the consensus by contending that intervention is not just permissible but obligatory in cases of a humanitarian emergency.
16. UN Security Council Resolution 940 (1994), par. 4. Although the term 'all necessary means' is standardly employed to include force, the subsequent use of force by the United States provoked Dante Caputo, UN envoy to Haiti, to resign. Caputo argued that the United States had acted without sufficient consultation with other member states. Additionally, many states "harbored serious reservations" about the legality of the U.S.-led intervention, on the ground that there was no threat to international peace and no supreme humanitarian emergency. See Brian D. Lepard, Rethinking Humanitarian Intervention (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 18.
17. Andrea Kathryn Talentino, Military Intervention after the Cold War (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 130.
18. Iris Young, "Violence against Power: Critical Thoughts on Military Intervention," in Ethics and Foreign Intervention, ed. Deen Chattterjee and Don Scheid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 251-73, 258.
19. Wheeler, Saving Strangers, 150-51. Secretary of State James Baker persuaded the president to create a safe haven, responding to congressional and public pressure on behalf of the Kurds.
20. David Luban argued that "any proportional struggle for socially basic human rights is justified" in "Just War and Human Rights," Philosophy & Public Affairs 9 (1980): 160-81, 179. We agree with Luban, with the important proviso that the proportionality principle applies only to intervention into illegitimate states.
21. A word of clarification is in order regarding the relation of our account to the doctrine of double effect as it appears in theories of just war. Traditional versions of the doctrine combine (1) an absolute deontological prohibition on the intentional killing of noncombatants and (2) a permission for the foreseeable but unintentional killing of noncombatants, provided that the use of force meets the other conditions for a just war. We accept at least provisionally the idea of a deontological constraint against the intentional killing of noncombatants, and we endorse the norm that permits the foreseeable but unintentional killing of noncombatants. However, it seems to us that the deontological constraint should be not be understood as an absolute prohibition but rather as barring the intentional killing of noncombatants unless some extremely high threshold level of bad consequences is met and the intentional killing of noncombatants is the only way to avert those consequences. Below the "deontological threshold," there is no weighing of the consequences to see how many intentional killings of noncombatants are permissible: any such killings are impermissible. But it is still permissible to impose some risk of death on noncombatants by military actions that do not intentionally kill them. Our proportionality principle operates as a constraint on the level of risk from foreseeable but unintentional killing to which any noncombatant may be subjected. Above the threshold, intentional killing is permitted but only to the extent necessary to avert the terrible consequences that would otherwise ensue. Additionally, the proportionality principle continues to apply to those noncombatants whose intentional killing is not necessary to avert the consequences in question. Even if we are wrong that a threshold deontology is more plausible than an absolutist one, our two-pronged approach to humanitarian intervention would not be undermined. Any use of military force would simply be assessed on the premise that the situation was below the threshold. More complicated emendations to our approach would be required if philosophers such as Frances Kamm, who reject the double-effect doctrine, are right. But our approach would not thereby be defeated. See Kamm, "Failures of Just War Theory: Terror, Harm and Justice," Ethics 114 (2004): 650-92.
22. Jeff McMahan, "Just Cause for War," Ethics and International Affairs 18 (2005): 1-21, 12.
23. David Rodin takes the nonconformist view that states have no right of self-defense. See David Rodin, War and Self-Defense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
24. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 90.
25. Ibid., 87-88.
26. Compare Luban, "Just War and Human Rights," 179; and Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).
27. Fernando Tesón, Humanitarian Intervention, 3rd ed. (Ardsley, NY: Transnational, 2005), 160. Tesón makes an exception for "those extreme situations [in which individuals] have lost their autonomy" (160). Tesón is a critic of the consensus requirement of a supreme humanitarian emergency.
28. McMahan, "Just Cause for War," 13.
29. Richard Miller, "Respectable Oppressors, Hypocritical Liberators: Morality, Intervention, and Reality," in Chattterjee and Scheid, eds., Ethics and Foreign Intervention, 224.
30. We are assuming that the intervention meets a "last resort" condition, so that there would be little likelihood of the rights violations ceasing in the absence of an intervention.
31. Existing international law permits the cross-border use of force by states only for purposes of self-defense or when authorized by the UN Security Council as necessary to maintain international peace and security. There is considerable debate whether international law now incorporates an additional exception to the general ban on the cross-border use of force and permits such force to be employed to avert humanitarian catastrophes. The weight of opinion among international lawyers is that, at present, such an exception is not part of international law. See Ryan Goodman, "Humanitarian Intervention and Pretexts for War," American Journal of International Law 100 (2006): 107-41, 111-12.
32. We borrow the term 'deep morality' from Jeff McMahan, who distinguishes the "deep morality of war" from the rules of a justifiable law of war. "The Ethics of Killing in War," Ethics 114 (2004): 693-733, 730.
33. Simon Chesterman, Just War or Just Peace? Humanitarian Intervention and International Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 231.
34. Nico Krisch, "Review Essay: Legality, Morality, and the Dilemma of Humanitarian Intervention after Kosovo," European Journal of International Law 13 (2002): 323-36, 323.
35. Ibid., sec. 6.
36. A very rare systematic empirical analysis of one aspect of the international law issue can be found in Goodman, "Humanitarian Intervention and Pretexts for War." Analyzing data from the Correlates of War data set, Goodman comes to the conclusion that legalizing unilateral humanitarian intervention would not lead to problems of abuse and, in fact, would decrease the number of wars undertaken on pretextual grounds.
37. Allen Buchanan, "Institutionalizing the Just War," Philosophy & Public Affairs 34 (2006): 2-38, 3.
38. Ibid., 6.
39. There is no authoritative definition of assassination. We will follow the one offered by Franklin L. Ford: "the intentional killing of a specified victim or group of victims perpetrated for reasons related to his (her, their) public prominence and undertaken with a political purpose in view." Political Murder: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 2. Our concern in this article is with the peacetime assassination of the leaders of states.
40. See Ward Thomas, "The New Age of Assassination," SAIS Review 25 (2005): 27-39, 29. Thomas cogently argues that "considerable evidence suggests that the norm [against assassination] has been losing strength in recent decades."
41. "Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders," Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, November 20, 1975, 94th Congress, 1st Session, Report no. 94-465.
42. In this context, a ruler is "responsible" if he is perpetrating the atrocities or is capable of stopping them but chooses not to do so.
43. There is risk to persons other than the target of an assassination. Recall that John Connally was wounded during the assassination of President Kennedy. But the range of persons upon whom a serious risk is imposed is typically far less in an assassination attempt than during an armed intervention.
44. Thomas More, Utopia (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1949), 65. The Utopian policy of encouraging assassinations was, to be sure, designed as an instrument of war whose aim was to make a quick end to the hostilities.
45. Fernando Tesón, A Philosophy of International Law (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998), 64-65.
46. Ibid., 65.
47. James Rachels recognizes this point about assassination not being punishment (and thus not being a violation of due process rights) in his essay, "Political Assassination," in Assassination, ed. Harold Zellner (Cambridge: Schenkman, 1974), 9-21, 18.
48. Hitler was certainly eligible for assassination after September 1939, but our discussion concerns peacetime assassinations. He might also have been eligible before then, but it would be a complicated task to determine just when.
49. Notice that, according to our account, a ruler who lacks the right against being killed is not necessarily morally guilty or deserving of death. The permissibility of an assassination rests on the moral urgency of the situation and not on the need to punish the ruler.
50. One might think that assassination is more liable to abuse than armed intervention both because the former can be carried out in clandestine fashion and because it does not require the politically "expensive" use of large numbers of troops. Surely these are relevant considerations. On the other hand, the relative ease of assassination also brings additional disincentives, since leaders know that there is a much greater chance of retaliatory assassination than retaliatory intervention.
51. Ford, Political Murders, 387. It is worth noting that no assassinations to date have been authorized by an international agency designed to review political leaders with a view to liberating oppressed populations.
52. Buchanan, "Institutionalizing the Just War," 6.