Consent, Forcible Intervention, and Internal Justification to Use Force

Abstract

Consent has become an increasingly common legal justification for states that seek to intervene in internal conflicts in other states. While the literature on this issue has increased exponentially in recent years, basic questions remain unanswered. In this brief comment, I focus on two tricky issues in international law: (a) who can consent to the use of military force within a state; and (b) under what circumstances consent can legalize forcible intervention. Concerning the latter question, this contribution identifies a missing link in the discussion: usually, legal discourse deals with the issue of consent in disconnect from the question whether the consenting party's initial resort to force was itself just. In this comment, I suggest a preliminary way to fill this gap: third party intervention would be legal only if the requesting government was itself justified in its first resort to force under international human rights law.

Keywords: International Law, Intervention, Use of Force, International Humanitarian Law, International Human Rights Law, Jus ad Bellum, Non-International Armed Conflict