249 / 464
235
YOU CAN’T HAVE ONE WITHOUT THE OTHER, CAN YOU? …
‘overthrow a tyrannical government (at home
or abroad
)’ as being ‘morally right’.
61
At another occasion he argued even more straightforwardly and in explicit deviation
from the threshold set in the ICISS report, which he deems as being too high, that
humanitarian interventions may be applied in severe cases of tyranny,
i.e.
governments
that perpetrate systematic, widespread and pervasive human rights violations. The
factors he mentions as being relevant in this assessment clearly have the ideal of a liberal
democracy in mind: representativeness of the government, the occurrence of arbitrary
detention or torture, freedom of speech, the treatment of political opposition groups,
or the guarantee of the most basic standards of a fair judiciary.
62
Hence, a regime such
as the one of Saddam Hussein was an ‘easy candidate’ for military intervention, while
even less-oppressive regimes are basically not protected by the sovereignty principle.
63
Allan Buchanan, another eminent voice in favour of using force to topple
oppressive regimes absent gross human rights abuses as described by the ICISS report
or other documents related to the responsibility to protect, is another example. Arguing
from an explicitly cosmopolitan viewpoint, he makes his case as follows: first, he starts
with the well-known assumption that sovereignty is conditional upon the protection
of human rights, a requirement that is best-served by democracies. In addition,
interventions in cases of actual mass atrocities generally fail to create a sustaining
effect that lasts not only while the intervener takes action. Most importantly,
then, he argues that liberals generally acknowledge the right of a people to wage a
revolutionary war against its own illegitimate government and – in stark contrast
to Michael Walzer and John Stuart Mill – he thus asks the following: ‘[…] if war
is morally permissible for the sake of establishing democracy for ourselves, could
not war to establish democracy in another country that is so thoroughly repressive
as to make revolution virtually impossible also be a moral option?’
64
Lastly, he adds
that the norm to use force only in cases of imminent or actual attacks is ‘not a
fundamental moral principle but at most a contingent moral rule, one whose validity
may vary with institutional context.’
65
Secondly, even if one wants to adhere to the artificial distinction between using
force in cases of gross human rights violations and regime change, it needs to be asked
whether there exists a distinct hierarchy between intervening on behalf of human
rights and regime change. For the policy-maker, it seems that regime change will
only be accepted by other states if it results from an intervention at least primarily
undertaken to prevent fundamental human rights, a category that does not cover the
right to vote or other rights related to democratic principles. However, preventive
61
Fernando Tesón,
A Philosophy of International Law
(Perseus Books, 1998) 56 (own emphasis).
62
Fernando Tesón, ‘Eight principles for humanitarian intervention’ (2006) 5/2
Journal of Military Ethics
93, 98-105.
63
Ibid
. See also Fernando Tesón, ‘Ending Tyranny in Iraq’ (2005) 19/2
Ethics and International Affairs
1.
64
Allen Buchanan,
Human Rights, Legitimacy, and the Use of Force
(OUP, 2010), 266.
65
Ibid
.