8.7C - Interventions and Sovereignty

Some Western governments frequently condemn human rights violations and use them as conditions for offering aid, negotiating trade agreements and as a reason for military intervention, which challenge ideas of national sovereignty.  

In most situations the intervention of one sovereign state in the affairs of another is considered illegal under international law. Intervention breaches the principle of sovereignty, which is itself a crucial element of international law and the operation of the UN. Sovereignty is the legal right to govern a physical territory, and has four aspects:
  1. ​a government, organised within a territory, has authority over that territory
  2. the government controls movement of people and goods across the territory's borders
  3. the government and territory is recognised by other governments
  4. other organisations, outside the territory, do not have higher authority

Any intervention by other sovereign states breaches these aspects of sovereignty. In practice this usually means the bar for intervention is high: there needs to be very strong moral and ethical grounds for direct military intervention, e.g. widespread and serious human rights violations. 

Western governments do intervene, indirectly, in the affairs of other sovereign states by using economic levers to apply pressure. This is done in two main ways:
  1. Offering aid to help economic and social development, but attaching conditions ('strings attached') that seek to improve some aspect of human rights, such as the education of women and girls, or strengthening the rights of a minority group. 
    1. Foreign aid, or 'Official Development Assistence' (ODA) is money (grants or loans) or technical help/equipment given from a donor country to a recipient to help economic and social developement. 
  2. Negotiating trade agreements such as lower import tariffs or removing import quotas, but on the condition that human rights are improved. 

This can be seen in two ways:
  1. Positive: 'ethical foreign policy', i.e. using the power of trade and aid to improve the lives of people in developing countries by strengthening their human rights.
  2. Negative: an interference in sovereign affairs, by effectively forcing the country to change internal policy in order to gain a benefit from another country.