Legal Standards for Intervention in Internal Conflicts

Abstract

It is not only an honor, but a personal pleasure to have the opportunity to participate in a conference honoring a great American Secretary of State and international lawyer, Dean Rusk.There will be many tributes during the course of this conference to former Secretary Rusk and to the great contributions that he has made to international law and diplomacy, but for me the most important contribution is his serviceto use a local analogyas a silver bell for freedom.In a world of many voices of confusion and doubt, he has served to call attention to the importance of self-determination, democratic freedoms, the rule of law, and the great principles of the United Nations Charter as the foundations for a peaceful world.It is only fitting that in a conference honoring such a man we look at one of the greatest challenges to the United Nations system for control of coercion in the world: the problem of intervention and counter-intervention in internal conflicts.The primary violence realized in the post-Charter world has been some variant of civil or mixed civil-international conflict, and terrorist, interventionary, and counter-interventionary actions in such conflicts.We can cite too many examples of this kind of violence since World War II: Nigeria-Biafra, Northern Ireland, the Indo-China conflict, the Korean conflict, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and in the setting of current concern, the conflicts taking place in Central America.Developing an effective framework to control intervention and non-intervention in the contemporary world is what we might call a Rubik's cube of international law.The normative aspects of interventionary behavior present a great puzzle, but not one that is incapable of solution.Before turning to the specifics of the problem of developing norms of intervention, it might be useful to first step back and look at a somewhat broader framework and consider the overall