by PASCAL HERREN
On 16 August 1860, a French expeditionary force landed in Beirut. According to Napoleon III, the French military were going to “restore order” in Syria, then an Ottoman province. Regarded today as the first example of “the right to intervene on humanitarian grounds”, the military intervention actually served to increase France’s economic stranglehold in the region.
A humanitarian intervention in Syria is recurrently demanded; it should put an end to the suffering which the population has been exposed to since 2011 due to the struggles between the regime and the armed opposition. The main responsibility for these ?ghts is attributed – rightly or wrongly – to the government.
So, this relief effort would involve overthrowing the current regime. It is suspected to have indirectly started several months ago, when the insurgents were armed and also agents and foreign troops were deployed into the area. However, the use of force on the territory of a foreign country without the consent of the competent authorities contradicts the principle of state sovereignty enshrined in the UN Charter. Use of force between states is prohibited with the exception of the case of legitimate defense or a joint action decided by the Security Council.
The International Court of Justice has condemned the military support, which the Reagan administration gave to the insurgent Nicaraguan Contras, struggling to overthrow the Sandinista government in 1986. The Court of Justice had even speci?ed that such support was not suitable to secure the respect for human rights, even though Washington accused the regime of having committed atrocities.
These legal obstacles have not prevented a unilateral practice from developing, of?cially reasoned with altruistic motives, as for example the bombing of former Yugoslavia during the Kosovo crisis in 1999, or the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The most recent example in this series represents the action in Libya in 2011, where some States have admitted that it went far beyond the means the Security Council’s resolution of 1973 had admitted.
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As early as in 1840, François Guizot, former ambassador of France in London, had summed up the geopolitical considerations prevailing in the European courts, which in his eyes followed the policy of the British foreign minister Lord Palmerston, as follows: “There, in the depth of any valley, on top of any mountain in the Lebanon Mountains, there are husbands, women, children, who love each other, who enjoy life and who will be massacred tomorrow, because Lord Palmerston, while travelling on the train from London to Southampton, will have said to himself: ‘Syria must rise, I need an uprising in Syria, if Syria does not rise, I am a fool.’”
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