......"Humanitarian intervention" is the notion that national sovereignty is limited, and the more powerful countries have a responsibility to intervene with military force in internal situations in less powerful countries, in order to prevent genocide or crimes against humanity. Samantha Power and others developed the idea based on shocking events such as the Rwanda genocide of 1994. The idea was further developed into United Nations policy guidelines as "Responsibility to Protect" or R2P at the UN World Summit in 2005, after the overthrow of the legally elected government of President Jean Bertrand Aristide in Haiti. Note these are guidelines, not yet part of international law.
"Responsibility to Protect" requires nations to protect their own peoples against "genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity," and suggests that if a nation can't or won't do that, other nations can and should intervene. It does say that armed intervention should be the "last resort" and should not do more harm than good. But how can one tell in advance?
In the Haiti situation, the United States, France and Canada had been looking for a legalistic mechanism to justify their overthrow of Aristide, and to place Haiti under outside control so as to prevent him or his Lavalas Party from returning to power.
But this intervention did not bring either peace or security to Haiti, which has continued to be wracked by severe problems that the wealthy capitalist countries merely exploit and do nothing to solve. It came just after Aristide had annoyed France and frightened the U.S. by reviving demands that France pay reparations to Haiti for economic damage caused by France in the 19th century. (France had insisted that Haiti reimburse the losses entailed by French citizens whose "property," including slaves, was lost with Haiti's independence.).......
http://peoplesworld.org/humanitarian-intervention-in-syria-is-a-hoax/
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