Definition

When a government turns viciously against its own people, what may or should other governments do? The events of the recent past do not permit this to be dismissed as an “academic question.”

If the wrong being perpetrated within a state against a part of its own population is of a kind specifically prohibited by international agreement (e.g. the Genocide Convention and treaties regarding racial discrimination, torture, the rights of women and children, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as agreements on the humanitarian law applicable in civil conflict), humanitarian intervention against those prohibited acts may be thought of as a subspecies of self-help. This is conceptually more persuasive if the wrongful acts have been characterized explicitly or implicitly by the applicable universal treaties as offenses erga omnes: that is, against any and all states party to the agreement defining and prohibiting the wrong. In such circumstances, it is possible to argue that every state may claim a right of self-help as a vicarious victim of any violation, at least after exhaustion of institutional and diplomatic remedies.