The Effect of Security Council Mandates on the Proportionality Analysis in Humanitarian Interventions

Abstract

In March 2011 the United Nations Security Council took an unprecedented step in response to the increasingly brutal repression of protests in Libya. It issued resolution 1973, authorising military intervention in line with the Security Council’s ‘determination to ensure the protection of civilians and civilian populated areas and the rapid and unimpeded passage of humanitarian assistance’. Under this mandate, NATO carried out 9 700 strike sorties. The notion of military intervention to protect civilians may well be hailed as an important step toward realising the responsibility to protect, however it poses significant difficulty to military planners when calculating what targets to strike and what force is proportional. If one is intervening purely to protect civilians, then potentially any civilian casualty is unacceptable as it would amount to killing one civilian to save another. The very notion of an humanitarian intervention therefore, poses crucial questions for the application of humanitarian law.