CYIL 2012

JOSEF MRÁZEK CYIL 3 ȍ2012Ȏ It is possible to remember that president W. Wilson attempted to apply a doctrine of “constitutionality of internal changes” of government. They should not be recognised, except where they had taken constitutional, democratic methods. This doctrine was very soon abandoned. Otherwise the United States could not enter into diplomatic relations with the great majority of Latin American governments, which mostly come in power through an army coup d’état. W. Friedmann wrote in 1965: “The conditions under which a state may be entitled, as an aspect of self-defence, to intervene in another state, in order to protect its nationals from injury, were formulated by prof. Waldock in 1952 as follows: ‘There must be (1) an imminent threat of injury to nationals, (2) a failure or inability on the part of the territorial sovereign to protect them and (3) measures of protection strictly confined to the object of protecting them against injury’.” 20 This reason was used by British Government in support of its armed intervention in Egypt during the Suez crisis of 1956, and by the United States in protection of its nationals in the Dominican Republic in 1965. It was also one of the grounds invoked by the United States for its invasion of Grenada in 1982. The Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia in 1979 was justified by the genocidal activities of the Pol Pot regime. D. W. Bowett took the position that humanitarian intervention had been lawful before the UN Charter and remained lawful thereafter. 21 T. M. Franck described humanitarian intervention as “a subspecies of self-help” stating that “humanitarian intervention has been used by states, and by regional organisations, to justify their use of force (without prior Security Council authorization) in various circumstances”. Mr. Franck suggested either “a gradual reinterpretation by the United Nations itself of Article 2 (4) or the evolution of a subsidiary adjectival international law of mitigation, one that may formally continue to assert the illegality of state recourse to force but which, in ascertainable circumstances, mitigates the consequences of such wrongful acts imposing no, or only nominal, consequences on states which, by their admittedly wrongful intervention, have demonstrably prevented the occurrence of some greater wrong.” 22 The principle of non-intervention was confirmed in a number of UN resolutions: the Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty of 1965 [G.A.Res. 2131(XX)]; the Declaration on Principles of International Law of 1970 [G.A.Res. 2625 (XXV)]; the Helsinki Final Act of 1975; the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States of 1974 [G.A. Res. 3281(XXIX)], and others. In the Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention into the Domestic Affairs it was stated that any “armed intervention is synonymous with aggression” and that 20 The Regulation of the Use of Force by Individual States in International Law, Recueil des Cours Collected Courses of the Hague Academy of International Law 451, 467. 21 Bowett, Self-Defence in International Law , Manchester 1958, p. 87-90. 22 Frank T. M., Recourse to Force, State Action Against Threats and Armed Attacks , Cambridge University Press 2004, pp. 135-6; 139.

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