GENERAL REMARKS

Although the two legal regimes are traditionally kept doctrinally separate for very good reasons to do with the need for international humanitarian law (IHL) to be universally and impartially applied equally by all parties to an armed conflict, there is a valid and interesting case to be made for the intersection of the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello when it comes to notions of humanitarian intervention and the protection of civilians. The latter has been one of the main objectives of IHL since the creation of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the adoption of the first Geneva Convention in 1864, whereas the former – in its most recent guise as the doctrine of the responsibility to protect (R2P) – has featured increasingly prominently in states’ debates on the use of force since at least 1999, when the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair intoned in his celebrated Chicago speech: ‘the principle of non-interference must be qualified in important respects. Acts of genocide can never be a purely internal matter. When oppression produces massive flows of refugees which unsettle neighbouring countries then they can properly be described as “threats to international peace and security”.’ If R2P interventions are oft en predicated upon the substantive violation of civilians’ protection in situations of armed conflict, which is the opposite of perceptions of the legality of actions within the context of an armed conflict (jus in bell o) being influenced by perceptions of the legality of the resort to force in the first place (jus ad bellum), is there – or should there be – a doctrinal link between the two? Although the answer to that question remains negative at the present time, it is at least arguable that a symbiosis in practice is emerging between these two different legal manifestations of humanitarian protection.

It is this symbiosis that is proposed and explored in the thoughtful chapters by Sophie Rondeau and Raphaël van Steenberghe that constitute this Part of the present volume.