Chapter 1

      Constructing Humanitarian Intervention

      It is important that when civilians in grave danger cry out, the international community, undaunted, is ready to respond.

      —UN Security Council, 17 March 2011

      On the evening of 17 March 2011, members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) met to discuss the deteriorating security situation in Libya. It was the fourth Security Council meeting on Libya in a month following the outbreak of violence between Colonel Muammar Qadhafi’s regime and the opponents to his rule. What started out in mid-February as peaceful protests against arbitrary arrest and extrajudicial killing by the government quickly deteriorated into an armed rebellion to overthrow Qadhafi and remove his regime from power. In the face of early rebel advances in the western region of the country, Qadhafi’s son Saif al-Islam Qadhafi had threatened that “rivers of blood will run through Libya” and casualties would increase from the dozens into the thousands if protesters refused to accept regime-initiated reforms.¹ Hours before the 17 March Security Council meeting, Colonel Qadhafi’s forces were poised to retake the rebel-held city of Benghazi. Qadhafi warned Benghazi’s residents that his forces would come that night and “they would show no mercy or compassion” to the opponents of his rule.² The Security Council, in United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York, was contemplating the text of a draft resolution submitted by France, Lebanon, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (U.S.). The resolution proposed the creation of a nofly zone in the airspace of Libya and authorized member states to take “all necessary measures” to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack, including Benghazi. Proponents of the resolution, including the ambassador of the UK, argued that the Charter of the United Nations protected the rights and values that civilians in Libya were advocating for, and that the Security Council had a responsibility to protect civilians from the violence perpetrated against them by their own government: “The central purpose of the resolution is clear: to end the violence, to protect civilians and to allow the people of Libya to determine their own future, free from the tyranny of the Al-Qadhafi regime. The Libyan population wants the same rights and freedoms that people across the Middle East and North Africa are demanding and that are enshrined in the values of the United Nations Charter. Today’s resolution puts the weight of the Security Council squarely behind the Libyan people in defence of those values.”³ Ten Security Council members voted in favor of Resolution 1973, paving the way for a humanitarian intervention in Libya that was remarkable both for the expansive mandate provided by the resolution and for the swift adoption by the Security Council.

      Humanitarian intervention in Libya marked an important evolution in an already remarkable shift in Security Council practice and state justifications for the use of military force that began in the 1990s. Faced with a mounting humanitarian crisis along the border of Iraq with Turkey and Iran in 1991, the Security Council permitted the creation of a no-fly zone to protect Iraqi Kurds and Shi’as from government attack because Saddam Hussein’s repression was causing a refugee crisis that was destabilizing the region and threatening the sovereignty of Iraq’s neighbors. By mid-decade, however, the UNSC began to justify its use of enforcement action under Chapter VII of the Charter by referring directly to human rights norms, rather than their effects on neighboring sovereign states.⁴

      Humanitarian intervention had been impermissible during the Cold War as human rights were considered to be within the domestic jurisdiction of each state and beyond the purview of the UNSC. In the 1970s, the Security Council did not address internal situations of mass killing but instead criticized UN members that intervened militarily to halt the bloodshed in neighboring states, despite positive humanitarian motives or effects.⁵ For example, in 1979 when Vietnam intervened militarily in Cambodia, effectively ending the murderous regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, Vietnam was condemned by the council for its intolerable breach of UN rules, despite its potential positive humanitarian effects. France’s ambassador to the Security Council argued that using military force, even against a detestable regime, was dangerous to international order: “The notion that because a regime is detestable foreign