CYIL 2012

JOSEF MRÁZEK CYIL 3 ȍ2012Ȏ United States is the “sole remaining superpower” which needs to maintain “some degree of international legitimacy and support”. The authors described their “present way of understanding the relevant international legal norms concerning the use of force” and justification for armed interventions in the following way: legitimate objectives emerged and evolved after World War II. As we shall see, international law concerning intervention is by no means static. Strategic realities have continually affected both how states have interpreted the basic rules of the UN Charter and the extent to which human rights principles have influenced the fact or character of interventions. 50 With regard to armed interventions in international law the question of their legality and legitimacy is often discussed. Both terms, of course, are not the same thing. Reviewing T. M. Franck’s book “The Power of Legitimacy Among Nations” published in 1990, M. Koskenniemi wrote: “Legitimacy is an intermediate concept whose very imprecision makes it available to avoid the attacks routinely mounted against the formal (but too abstract) idea of legal validity and the substantive (but too controversial) notion of justness”. He mentioned the distance between “legitimacy and justice” described by this work. 51 Authors supporting interveners as well as the idea of interventions often view even the unauthorised interventions as legitimate, if not legal. The sense of legitimacy of interventions and the success of interventions in view of some authors “will tend to overshadow the question of its technical legality.” In their view “interventions increasingly involve long-term efforts at political, social and economic transformation, their legitimacy will constantly be reassessed by relevant actors as circumstances evolve on the ground” and “a strong consensus about the intervention’s legitimacy from the beginning can increase the prospects for ongoing cooperation from both local and international actors”. Particularly the growing influence of human rights principles in shaping international understandings of legitimate military intervention has been mentioned. 52 In 1999 Secretary-General Kofi Annan called on member states to “forge unity behind the principle that massive and systematic violations of human rights – wherever they may take place – should not be allowed to stand”. 53 Some armed interventions were authorised by the UNSC while others were undertaken without such authorisation, the latter mostly argued in self-defence. In many cases the legal justification for intervention was widely contested (such as NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999 or the conflict in Iraq in 2003). As a rule the interveners argued that their interventions were consistent with the UNSC resolutions and therefore lawful. In armed interventions whose legal basis has been legally controversial, the question of legitimacy has been invoked. The goals of 50 Ibid. p. 20. 51 AJIL Vol. 86, 1992, No. 1, p. 175-6. 52 Stromseth J., Wippman D., Brooks R., Cambridge 2006, pp. 19-20, see note 48. p. 19-20. 53 Secretary-General Presents His Annual Report to the General Assembly, UN Press Release SG/ SM/7136 SA/9596, Sept. 20, 1999.

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