| BOOK
REVIEW
The Evolution of the Doctrine and Practice of Humanitarian
Intervention
By Francis Kofi Abiew
Publisher: Kluwer Law International, The Hague, The Netherlands,
1999. Price: $25. Pages: 325
Reviewer: Kofi Akosah-Sarpong
in Montreal, Canada.
The on-going crisis in Sierra Leone coupled with the international
community's difficult attempts to bring peace to the country informs
not only the riddle of humanitarian intervention but its evolution.
Dr. Francis Kofi Abiew's book charts how over time humans have slowly,
but surely, being evolving to interven in places of crisis like Sierra
Leone to bring peace and order in the world. Abiew's haul of complicated crisis, some dating back to the
pre-colonial times, for his new book about what makes human beings
intervene in the crisis of places outside their legal domain and the
problems they face in bringing order and peace, is a man-made hell of
place, filled with treachery, misunderstanding and distress. People's
limbs decapitated with machetes in Sierra Leone and Rwanda, villages
burnt down, farms turned upside down, diamonds mined freely by both
state agents and rebels, fields mined in Angola, children lying dead
on the pavements of Freetown and Kigali in the firestorms, egomaniac
warlords thinking of their persons rather than their societies,
mountains of emaciated corpses in the killing fields of Rwanda,
Burundi, Somalia, Cambodia and Liberia. Atmospheres charged with
hatred. Abiew, 41, a Ghanaian teacher of international law at Canada's
University of Windsor, has an ambitious aim: to inform us that the
issue of humanitarian intervention has become essentially important
since the Cold War as the Siera Leone and the Democratic Republic of
the Congo examples show and defends the rights of humanitarian
intervention, arguing that state sovereignty is not different from
humanitarian intervention. His immediate call is to the international community itself,
traditionally the domain that responds to human disaster but most
times too slow to respond to such crisis, to concern itself with the "protection of human rights and the right of intervention towards
those ends, or some, an obligation to intervene when violations reach
a stage that incite the outrage of the international community." His demonstration of the evolution of the legitimate basis for
humanitarian intervention reveals that sovereignty is equal to
responsibility and thus "when egregious human rights violations
occur either arising from governmental acts or in situations of
internal conflict, intervention is justified to protect those
rights." He demonstrates the humanoid's common humanity through
the resiliency of the United Nations Charter during the Cold War and
post-Cold war interventions in places like Iraq, the former
Yugoslavia, Somalia, Rwanda, Liberia, and Haiti. Also examined is
sources of support for humanitarian intervention. As the Sierra
Leonean crisis reveals Dr. Abiew informs us that support for
humanitarian intervention is key fundamental principle of
international law and relations. As a fastly evolving issue the doctrine of humanitarian
intervention, Dr. Abiew says, has long been a controversial subject.. "There is the viewpoint that intervention for the sake of
humanity cannot be legal, justifiable, or permissible. On the other
hand, there is growing international concern for protection of human
rights and the right of intervention towards those ends, or for some,
an obligation to intervene when violations reach a stage that incite
the outrage of the international community." But "while
state sovereignty is still important in international relations,
humanitarian imperatives have led to more interventions in matters
that are considered essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of
states." Abiew's book, The Evolution of the Doctrine and Practice of
Humanitarian Intervention (Kluwer Law International, The Hague), is
partly a tour of the revival of humanitarian intervention with "ramifications for the extent to which it has been, or is,
accepted in the international community" and partly a cool
analysis of what makes the issues terribly relevant today oiled by the
global communication networks which beam the Sierra Leones of the
world on the screens of televisions and the front pages of newspapers. "An important issue that often arises in international
relations is that of whether there are any standards of behaviour
applicable to states, and whether those standards can be regarded as
universal, given the different cultural traditions represented in the
international system. If there are any such standards, some would
argue that they do not matter since the most obvious rule of state
behaviour is grounded in self-interest. It is, however, argued that
there are certain minimum standards that can be regarded as universal
which states follow and that these standards matter in the assessment
of state behaviour," says Abiew, one of Africa's leading experts
on humanitarian intervention. Despite the various loopholes and contentious questions in the
United Nations Charter in terms of humanitarian intervention, Abiew
argues that the U.N Charter reconciles the "limitations on the
sovereignty of states which have accepted the respective
agreements." But he was quick to point out that "this does
not suggest the non-importance of sovereignty since the conclusion of
these covenants are themselves acts of sovereignty." In this way
he makes a norm of justified intervention grounded in the U.N Charter,
the human rights declarations, and covenants. Abiew draws cases of interventions, from 1945 to 1989, spanning the
Congo (1964) , the Dominican Republic, the East Pakistan (Bangladesh),
from 1945 to 1989, wrapped around the UN Charter, to buttress his
argument that intervention by a state helped end extreme rights
violations and the international community's responses to such
interventions. |