No Easy Answers

Repressive governments have long used the mantle of sovereignty to prevent life-saving assistance from reaching citizens ravaged by armed conflict, famine, and human rights violations within their own countries. Trapped inside sovereign borders, these victims remain vulnerable to the very regimes responsible for their plight. The international community finds it difficult to provide aid and protection when governments deny access to relief efforts, or where, as in Somalia, no functioning government exists.

Principles of sovereignty as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations protect states from outside interference, posing a formidable obstacle to humanitarian intervention. The Charter prohibits intervention in a state's domestic affairs, forbids the use of force by one state against another, and allows U.N.-sanctioned force only in instances where the Security Council determines there is a threat to international peace and security.

The citadel of sovereignty, however, is beginning to crack. Human rights law has begun to make governments accountable to citizens and has made the rights of individuals a legitimate subject of international attention. Recent U.N. Security Council resolutions recognize the need to override recalcitrant governments when armed conflict, massive human rights abuses, displacement, and starvation place countless lives at risk.

Respect for sovereignty must yield to concern for human rights. Linking massive human rights abuses and other large-scale tragedies to threats to international peace and security currently provides the only legal vehicle for overcoming sovereignty in order to authorize collective humanitarian intervention under the U.N. Charter. Sole reliance on this linkage, however, raises practical and ethical concerns.

For example, inherent in tying humanitarian interventions to threats to the peace is the practical concern that such threats are more likely to be acknowledged when the target country is geopolitically significant. Displaced persons from "important" European countries or oil-rich states may gain attention, while those from poor or less strategic countries languish because their loss is not perceived to threaten international peace.

AS SOVEREIGNTY ERODES, the international community has new opportunities to impose assistance and protection despite resistance of those running the country. Unfortunately, however, interventions thus far have been ad hoc and inconsistent, as evidenced in Somalia, Iraqi Kurdistan, Bosnia, and the Sudan. No coherent rationale has guided the international response.

No mechanism exists for consistent analysis, decision making, and action. Gone is the Cold War road map dictating assistance based on ideological markers and geopolitical superpower advantage. The world community now drifts from one crisis to another, reacting largely on the basis of domestic politics, media coverage, and public outcry.

We must not retreat to isolationism, but neither can this country afford the role of solo world cop. The demise of superpower rivalry presents a fresh opportunity for reasoned and humane collective response.

Certain principles should guide the international community as it examines when, where, and how to intervene on behalf of vulnerable populations. The central principle should be collective decision making in order to decrease the ability of individual states to use humanitarian intervention as a pretext for interfering in another state's affairs.

While collective decision making may ferret out biased national interest from truly humanitarian motives, it raises other problems. Governments can hide under the cloak of the United Nations as an excuse for not taking action. Or the Security Council may simply provide a cover for the United States and its allies to do as they wish. Developing countries, for instance, fear reliance on a Security Council in which they lack adequate representation.

The United Nations should automatically examine all severe humanitarian crises where governments block access to aid. An automatic review based on objective factors would reduce the ad hoc nature of decision making and ensure that suffering individuals, no matter where they are, receive full consideration of their need for relief. Victims from poor, geopolitically "insignificant" countries must receive the same timely attention as their resource-rich counterparts throughout the world.

Any resulting intervention should be necessary, proportionate, and strictly limited to its humanitarian purposes. It should not be used, for example, to overthrow a government or to gain territory. This approach preserves the true humanitarian nature of the intervention and discourages the use of force as a pretext for political interference. Nonetheless, such limitations raise important questions about keeping victims alive only to be struck by the next bullet.

The international community must establish consistent ethical grounds and processes to bring humanitarian aid to massive human suffering within sovereign borders. Failure to attend now to these issues will ensure that more children die in the next catastrophe while the international community fumbles for a response.

Nancy D. Arnison was an attorney and director of the Refugee and Asylum Project for Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights when this article appeared.