The Politics of Humanity

on the protection of human rights led to some of the most unaccountable
humanitarian action yet. Though professional humanitarians have pursued human
rights as a vocabulary both to hold the perpetrators of suffering to account, and to
grudgingly accept that in carrying out humanitarian action they might need holding
to account themselves as increasingly powerful actors, the ultimate expression of
this, humanitarian intervention, is profoundly unaccountable, for reasons that
cannot be reduced to the popular claim that it is always merely a front for self-
interested power politics.
The first set of problems here are practical. As much as we might like to
describe war euphemistically, employing terms like “collateral damage”,
immaculate war is as unlikely a concept as the immaculate conception: hands are
always dirtied in the process. Judith Shklar reminds us that “war works in favour of
the strong and against the interests of the weak”.^76 The fact that none of the legal
institutionalisations of the humanitarian impulse that deal with the conduct of war
are strictly part of International Human Rights Law is an indication of the practical
tension here: even the neatest, tidiest war is unlikely to fully respect the human
rights of those whose lives are radically disrupted, although of course in the
contexts in which humanitarian intervention is discussed this might represent an
improvement. But however well-intentioned, invading armies are rarely easily held
accountable in a battlefield context. There are of course accountability mechanisms
in place, both internal to those actors, such as military tribunals, and external, such
as war crimes trials. But these are defined not just by the victim (or the victor) but,
as Gerry Simpson makes clear, by a complex interaction of different political
relationships.^77
There can also be wider processes of accountability, but they tend to reach
upwards, back to the political leadership or political community that has usually
asked them to risk their lives. If democratic states are the ones carrying out
humanitarian interventions, then at least the military force used will be of paid
volunteers rather than conscripts. Here we might recall the ICRC principle of
76
77 Shklar, The Faces of Injustice , 100.
Gerry Simpson, Law, War and Crime: War Crimes Trials and the Reinvention of
International Law (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).