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International Law And The Nato Intervention In Kosovo

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 January 2008

Christopher Greenwood
Christopher Greenwood
Affiliation:
Professor of International Law, London School of Economics.
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Extract

This memorandum is submitted in response to a request from the Foreign Affairs Committee in connection with its hearings on the NATO intervention in Kosovo in March 1999. The memorandum addresses the following issues of international law:

(1) Was the resort to force by NATO consistent with international law? and

(2) Were the means employed by NATO, once the decision to use force had been taken, consistent with international law?

Type
Shorter Articles, Comments and Notes
Information
International & Comparative Law Quarterly , Volume 49 , Issue 4 , October 2000 , pp. 926 - 934
Copyright
Copyright © British Institute of International and Comparative Law 2000

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References

1. SCR 1199, penultimate paragraph of the Preamble; SCR 1203, penultimate paragraph of the Preamble. A determination of a threat to international peace was also implicit in SCR 1160.

2. Third paragraph of the Preamble.

3. SCR 1199, 6th paragraph of the Preamble.

4. SCR 1199, operative paragraph 2.

5. SCR 1199, operative paragraph 4.

6. See, e.g., the paper circulated by the FCO amongst NATO Member States in October 1998 and reproduced in Roberts, “NATO's ‘Humanitarian War’ over Kosovo” 41 Survival (1999) 102 at 106CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the statement by the Secretary of State for Defence in the House of Commons on 25 March 1999.

7. S/PV.3988, p.12; 24 March 1999.

8. Page 10.

9. See, e.g., the evidence given to this Committee by MrAust, A. I., Legal Counsellor, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (HC Paper 235–iii, p.92).Google Scholar

10. HL Debs (1998–1999) WA 140, 16 Nov. 1998.

11. See, e.g., Littmann, M., QC, Kosovo: Law and Diplomacy (Centre for Policy Studies, 1999).Google Scholar

12. Preamble to the United Nation Charter.

13. The FCO Planning Staff document “Is Intervention ever Justified?”, which came to the enigmatic conclusion that “the best case that can be made in support of humanitarian intervention is that it cannot be said to be unambiguously illegal” (Foreign Policy Document 148, para. 11.22), was written in 1984, during the Cold War and long before the Liberian and Iraqi interventions. The document is, in any event, a discussion paper, rather than an instance of United Kingdom State practice (see para. 11.2).

14. SCR 1199 (1998).

15. SCR 1203 (1998).

16. S/PRST/1999/2.

17. UN Doc. S/1999/328.

18. Protocol I is binding on the United Kingdom, which ratified it in 1998, but not on France or the United States of America, neither of which has become party to it. The most important principles stated in the Protocol are, however, part of customary international law and, as such, binding on all States.

19. Since this Memorandum was written, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has announced that, following an assessment by a team from her office of various allegations regarding the NATO campaign, she had concluded that there was no basis for opening an investigation into those allegations or into other incidents related to the NATO bombing. She informed the Security Council that:

Although some mistakes were made by NATO, I am very satisfied that there was no deliberate targeting of civilians or of unlawful military targets by NATO during the bombing campaign (US/PV.4150, p.3; 2 June 2000).