Possible problems with humanitarian intervention can include a strong country abusing the term in order to justify its attack of the sovereignty of a weaker county to the international community. In this situation, the violation of human rights is not the primary focus for the invading country. This may be clear or unclear depending on the public relation skill of the invading country.
A problem with the Kosovo intervention was when the allegations of the Serbian leader's accountability of the genocide of 200,000 Albanians came known to be false during the trial in which it became apparent that only 5000 Albanian deaths took place. It should be the case that the death of 5000 innocent lives would be enough for the international community to use force to put an end to the government responsible. However, it is blatantly wrong for an invading country to exaggerate situations to make a “humanitarian disaster” out of situations that are less than that for the sake of justifying their actions to the international scene.
Another issue that humanitarian intervention encounters is that of escalating an already violent situation. In some cases outside interference may only increase tensions. This issue is part of the feasibility of intervening with force. The group that decides to send armed troops into a situation has the responsibility to keep the casualty list as low as possible. If intervening with force will lead to the destruction or more human lives than not intervening then the choice ought to clearly be not to intervene. With that in mind though the possibly to interfere differently would always be an option.
There are two competing paradigms regarding human rights. One being that it is the responsibility of the state to secure the rights of its citizens. And the other being that it is the responsibility of all human life to uphold. The U.N. now adopts a responsibility to protect attitude. The R2P attitude becomes more of a cosmopolitan interpretation and becomes and important aspect for Just War thinkers. Now that the responsibility to protect is considered a universal duty to maintain it also applies to war. If Just War theorists contend that humanitarian intervention is an acceptable reason to go to war then they must also agree that it is also our duty to uphold human rights.
With that in mind human rights becomes a counter balance to reasons for not going to war. For example if there is a civil war going on within a country, and one side secures the means to unleash a wave of biological weapons upon the other side (creating vast amounts of non-combatant suffering and death) there would be pressure on the international community to interfere. In this example the international community would not initially move to intervene with the civil war of a sovereign nation but if one side makes threats to violate the human rights of the other sides' non-combatants it then becomes an issue of humanitarian intervention. The complex part of this scenario is of what amount of force to use. The delicate tact for this particular situation would be to neutralize the threat to human rights without interfering with the civil rights situation taking place in that sovereign nation. On paper this case has a clear and easy solution but in the real world there are going to be many more logistical problems to face.
It would most often be the case that a Just War theorist would support humanitarian intervention as a reason for using forceful interference. Based on R2P the maintenance of human rights overrides the sovereignty of the state. Still, some issues are raised when we compare humanitarian intervention and the Just War theory side by side.
One such issue raised by Just War thinkers is that of future violations of human rights. This is another appeal to the feasibility of armed military intervention. If intervening on behalf of human rights will in any way lead to the worsening of condition then, quite clearly, it ought to be avoided. This is one problem that can be addressed by examining the basic principles of Just War theory.
With the new attitude of R2P, we in the international community have the obligation to commit as much support to end the violations of human right around the globe as is feasible. The Just War theorist can easily raise the argument of universality, such as “why intervene in this case but not another?” This argument can be satisfied in two ways. Because humanitarian intervention is a responsibility there needs to be more examination to answer this objection.
The reasons for not intervening in every single situation are truly vast. While any number of reasons can be justified, I will focus on the one of logistics. Based on the amount of resources available to the free world it would utterly impossible to end every violation of human rights taking place in the world today. To begin to address this problem it would make sense to have something of a world court that makes the decision to intervene based on a set of guidelines like the ones I have looked at above.
