Explain how a government's stance on human rights can be undermined by their actions
(8 marks)
- Begin by explaining how some governments see themselves as advocates of human rights and have used them to justify military interventions
- Then discuss how sometimes their actions could undermine human rights e.g. the real motivation for the intervention and how they have carried out the intervention. Include examples you have studied in your answer.
- Finally, you could look at the other side of the argument and suggest why a country’s stance is not undermined by direct military intervention, backing it up with an example of military intervention, which has led to progress in human rights
Answer
Many Western governments see themselves as advocates of human rights and are very vocal about it in international forums. Military interventions are often justified as a last resort by nations claiming they are defending human rights, such as minority ethnic groups in a civil war. However, sometimes the actions of the combatant state could actually violate human rights’ laws.
Sometimes the intervention is based on wider global strategic interests such as the need to protect important resources, like oil and trading routes, rather than the protection of human rights. For example, the UK continues to offer military aid to Saudi Arabia, despite Saudi’s appalling human rights record against women and their violations of international humanitarian law in Yemen. This aid is beneficial to both countries through the amount of trade generated, but Amnesty International have claimed that the military aid supplied by the UK has played a key role in human rights abuses in Yemen by Saudi Arabia.
The US and UK invasion of Iraq was argued to be justified on the basis of protecting human rights. It was claimed that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, was using chemical weapons to attack the Kurdish ethnic minority group of Iraq. The US tortured captured soldiers in Iraq and practised rendition by sending prisoners to Guantanamo Bay. These actions directly violate the UDHR, which the US and UK have signed.
However, there are times when military intervention has been successful and the combatant country has upheld its stances on human rights. The deployment of NATO forces in Bosnia in 1995 has been widely viewed as successful in terms of ending the genocide by Bosnia Serbs. Eventually, the leaders responsible for these were prosecuted for war crimes. UK armed forces intervened in Sierra Leone during the civil war in 2000. The UK mission proved quick and decisive in ending the civil war through a ceasefire agreement. These two examples were achieved without the combatant countries being accused of acts of torture.