IV. Express in some sentences your understanding of the rights of an accused in the USA.

12. Humanitarian intervention

Newsweek, January 18, 1993

The right to humanitarian intervention is a revolutionary new concept in world affairs. Standard manuals on international law contain no reference to it.

It is not mentioned in the charter of the United Nations. Any sort of intervention, ‘direct or indirect, individual or collective’ in the domestic jurisdiction of another state is explicitly barred by the 1975 Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. And yet, lately an international prerogative to intervene in the internal affairs of apparently sovereign states for humanitarian or urgent human-rights purposes has emerged as a keystone of the post-communist new world order. It was invoked on behalf of the beleaguered Kurds of Iraq.

Unlike most influential ideas, whose origins tend to be cloudy, the paternity of the ‘right of intervention’ in its modern from is uncontested (though foreign meddling on religious or ideological, from the Crusades through the Brezhhnev doctrine). The new approach was first proposed by the gallant ‘French doctors’ who have traveled the world to treat the victims of war and natural catastrophe. More specifically, it was the brainchild of Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Medecins sans Frontieres.

For nearly 20 years, Kouchner has argued that the rights to deliver and to receive humanitarian aid are fundamental. They obviously take priority, Kouchner wrote, over ‘the right of dictatorial regimes to torture and kill their own peoples’.

So long as the cold war lasted, the Kouchner gospel fell mainly on deaf ears. The world leaders, East and West, resisted the notion as both illegal and dangerous.

If taken literally, the ‘right to intervene’ in civil wars could have produced a perilous new situation: every regional conflict would draw in major powers and thus quickly escalate into a struggle between communism and capitalism. Third-World rulers saw the intrusive French doctors and their flair for exposing injustice in faraway places as a permanent threat to their legitimacy. Nobody wanted to rock the cold-war boat.

But in the post-Soviet climate, the dangers of escalation virtually disappeared. Moscow edged away from support for its former clients in the Third World. At the United Nations, the Russian ambassador supported the American-led mission to roll back Saddam Hussein's aggression against Kuwait.

After a successful Desert Storm, the stage was set for a far more unconventional U.N. action: the creation of ‘ safe havens’ for the tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds then starving and freezing in the snowcapped mountains of northern Iraq.

Relief for the Iraqi Kurds was an almost universally popular operation. Across the world, citizens had watched on their television screens the agony of displaced Kurdish families fleeing Saddam's army. To the accompaniment of much editorial-page applause, American and allied troops, working under Security Council Resolution 688, crossed the Turkish-Iraqi border and set themselves up as a benevolent army of occupation.

The operation succeeded, swiftly and with only minimal casualties on the part of the interveners. And, little-noticed as it was at the time, the ‘ right of intervention’ had achieved a foothold in international affairs.

I. Please indicate and explain any incorrect statements you may find in the following sentences:

Humanitarian intervention is an old concept in world affairs.

The right to humanitarian intervention is implied by the international documents.

Third-World rulers do not accept the principal of humanitarian intervention.

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