voluntary service. Indeed, there have been calls for a voluntary UN army, but at the
present this seems fanciful to say the least, and in any case would not guard against
the kind of abuses that UN peacekeepers have been guilty of.^78 The best that can
currently be hoped for are volunteer soldiers from democratic states, but even in
this case, the accountability of a soldier asked to die for his country in the name of
humanity is at several removes from the likely victims of excesses he might commit.
This links to the issue of where humanitarian intervention sits in relation to
human rights violations, and what it is supposed to deliver: an end to the killing,
peace, justice or punishment?^79 Does humanitarian intervention represent the
failure, or success of human rights? Success in the sense of an ability to summon
armies, failure because war is the worst way to honour human rights. Arguably
humanitarian intervention exists in a liminal space at the edge of human rights
protection, where the enforcement of the international human rights regime
reaches its end, and yields once again to the contingencies of rescue. Clearly, this is
a terrain that only humanitarianism as a concept can fully accommodate, and as
such, has to acknowledge the possibility of. If humanitarian intervention is the
human rights regime working, then professional humanitarians must find it difficult
to detach themselves from seeing that end as desirable. If humanitarian
intervention is the human rights regime failing, what else but humanitarianism can
provide a vocabulary to articulate a last resort act of rescue in defence of common
humanity?
These tensions were well summarised by the Independent International
Commission on Kosovo’s famous description of the NATO intervention as illegal but
legitimate.^80 This put the intervening states, and those who supported them,
including many NGOs, in the position of acting both irresponsibly, and therefore
unaccountably, in legal terms, but responsibly in broader humanitarian terms. This
78
Carl Kaysen and George Rathjens, "The Case for a Volunteer UN Military Force", Daedalus
132, no. 1 (2003). Pattison, Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect ,
229-236. 79
For instance, it may be useful, as Lang suggests, to distinguish between humanitarian and
punitive intervention. Anthony F. Lang, Jr., Punishment, Justice and International Relations:
Ethics and Order after the Cold War 80 (London: Routledge, 2008), 59-65.
Independent International Commission on Kosovo, The Kosovo Report.