Isn`t a humanitarian Intervention, a military attack with tanks, artillery and air-force to secure human rights not a contradictio in adiecto?

Let us speak clearly. No one is suggesting that there is a right on the part of states to use their armed forces to enforce every type of human right in every situation. The real question is, whether it is legitimate to use military force in extreme cases of humanitarian need when you are faced with very large scale of loss of life or the threat of such loss of life, violations of human rights of the most severe kind. In those circumstances I take the view that international law permits outside intervention to prevent those kinds of human rights violations. It is not a contradiction in terms, because what you have here is a use of force which is designed to - and will actually - prevent much more serious consequences in the future.

You speak about a case of emergency. But even the attempt to solve it has as a consequence, that innocents will be killed - maybe the same innocents whose rights are to be secured. Do the intervening states have the right to pay this price?

If the state defends itself against aggression, if its armed forces defend its people against an invader, then almost invariably some of the people you defend will lose their lives, because of that defence. But you have to set that off against the fact that only by exercising your right of self-defence can you save many more people. And the same principle holds good with humanitarian intervention. Take for example the case of Ruanda. In 1994 when the massacres in Ruanda started, if the outside world had intervened by force, we would certainly have killed a number of people in Ruanda, we would probably have killed some of those whom we were trying to save, but we might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives by that intervention.

But the loss of live in the one case is hypothetical: You think there will be killed more lives if you don`t intervene, but you cannot be sure. The loss of live in the case of an intervention is a real one. And there is another problem: In law, at least in german law, it is not allowed to take the live of an innocent, to save the live of another one. Even in case of emergency you are not allowed to kill ten innocent people to save a hundred, because each human live has an uncountable worth.

First of all, there was nothing hypothetical about the loss of life in Ruanda and you are not setting off a definite loss of life now against the possible loss of life in the future. What you are doing is comparing the loss of life you cause by intervening against the certainty of far.greater loss of life if you stand back and do nothing. The second point you rise is that in German criminal law you would not be allowed to take life in order to save life. I agree that, as a matter of principle, to kill one victim in order to save another is not permitted. But if a couple of police officers saw a group of terrorists shooting indiscriminately into a crowd of shoppers in a shopping-centre, the law would surely permit those policemen to fire on the terrorists in an attempt to stop the slaughter, even if, in doing so, they might kill some of the bystanders they were trying to protect.

But the more important point is this, when you are dealing with a situation like Kosovo or Ruanda or Nothern Iraq in April 1991, you are dealing with a situation which is simply never going to arise for legal system like German or English criminal law. So the comparison between how we regulate our own domestic affairs and the situation on the scale of something like Ruanda is a false comparison. One simply doesn't get massacres on that scale as a problem which an ordinary legal system would have to cope with in a national setting.

The question arises, where to draw the line? How many people have to be killed, until one speaks of a massacre of extraordinary kind, that allows humanitarian intervention?

I don't think you can draw a bright line and say that this case is straightforward, that case is straightforward. Many of these cases are going to be very difficult. It seems to me that in Ruanda there was clearly a case for outside intervention, likewise in Kosovo and in Iraq, whereas if you take the human rights violations which sadly Amnesty International reports occuring in most countries in the world from year to year, the situation would clearly not be serious enough to merit outside military intervention. I think that the best one can say is that the standard has to be flexible, but that military intervention should be confined to cases of extreme humanitarian need, cases where there is an overwhelming moral imperative to intervene.

You`ve spoken about several cases, in which humanitarian intervention seemed legitimate to you. One of these cases was the Kosovo - but until now the large scale massacres, that led to the decision to intervene, have not been confirmed. Instead of the expected more the tenthousands dead, the investigators of the ICTY found not more then about 2000, some of them being Serbs, others having died after the intervention. That of course doesn`t make the situation acceptable - but the question is if the NATO wasn`t too fast in saying, there are massacres of such large extent, that there is only the one possibility left to stop iT: the intervention. The question is too, which evidence is needed for stating that there is a need for intervention since that is a step drawing hard consequences for everyone?

As far as Kosovo is concerned, it's not simply a question of counting the number of people who were killed by the paramilitaries in February and March, the months leading up to the intervention, or even in the period after the intervention started. You have to look at a much broader problem, which is that already by the middle of March the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said, that there were nearly half a million people, that is 25 percent of the entire population of Kosovo, who had been driven out of their homes and were living as displaced persons or refugees. Then, after the bombing began, there was a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing, an attempt to drive an entire community, the majority community in Kosovo, out of the homes, out of the towns and villages they had lived in, in the case of many families for hundreds of years, in order to expel them from the entire territory. There I think you have a situation where there is a need for intervention. As for evidence, it is not just the evidence of the states that intervened, you have also what the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said. You have a series of reports to the UN Security Council. Six months before the intervention.the UN Security Council was talking about an impending humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo, in resolution 1198 in September 1998. So it is not something which the NATO countries discovered for themselves, it is something that is objectively verifiable.

But the intervention didn't calm down the situation but gave reason for an escalation of ethnic cleansing, an escalation one could have imagined before sending the bomber commands. So the question is, if the intervention hasn't for a good part, lead to the catastrophe it was supposed to stop.

I accept that the situation in Kosovo got worse in the immediate aftermath of the Nato intervention starting. But that doesn't mean to say that that was because of the Nato intervention. There is very good evidence, which for example the German defence minister presented to the Bundestag at the beginning of April 1999, that the operation which took place in Kosovo immediately the bombing started, was something which had been planned for a considerable period of time within Yugoslavia. Indeed it is very difficult to see how it could be otherwise. The scale of what was done and the efficiency with which it was done, the awful efficiency with which it was done, is not something which could have been a spontaneous reaction to Nato's acts. So, I think the real question is not "were conditions worse one week before the bombing than one week afterwards ?" but rather, "would conditions have been worse if Nato had not intervened". And I am quite convinced that they would had been a great deal worse. Moreover the expulsion of these people would have been permanent. There is no way in which we could now sit back and contemplate those number of people living in refugee camps as the winter begins.

Looking at the situation as you do, the question arises why the NATO didn`t follow the path international law gives you in chapter 7 of the UN-Charta, and ask the Security Council to do something about the situation in Kosovo? Isn't it so, that especially humanitarian intervention, that are supposed to strengthen the rule of law, shoul be precisely within the borders, that guard the rule of law?

The UN security council had taken action regarding Kosovo. A year before the intervention it passed a resolution which condemned what Yugoslavia was doing and described it as a threat to international peace and security. It repeated that condemnation in September of 1998 and again in October. So, by the time the Nato action started, you have three security council resolutions, legally binding on Yugoslavia, requiring Yugoslavia to withdraw its paramilitary forces and cease the oppression of the civilian population. Yugoslavia was very clearly in breach of those resolutions. They are also important resolutions, because they show that the security council regarded the situation in Kosovo not as an internal problem of Yugoslavia but as a matter for international concern, a threat to international peace. After the conflict was over, the security council passed another resolution which authorized the dispatch of ground forces into Kosovo and created a UN administration for Kosovo. What is missing is that the security council would not have authorized military action in March, not because there wasn't a majority for it, but because the Russian Federation would have vetoed it. And you get a very clear insight into the security council's views, because only a few days after the Nato actions started, the Russian Federation tabled a draft resolution, which would have condemned Nato. That draft resolution was defeated by twelve votes to three. So that is a pretty clear indication that the majority of the security council, and it is not a majority made up of Nato states, but countries like Gabon, Gambia, Malaysia, Argentina, Brazil, Bahrain, those countries were prepared to vote with the Nato members of the council and against the resolution put forward by the Russians.

But the right to veto exists. And if you don`t move to the Security Council, because.you don`t want accept a veto, you leave the way international public law has opened to you and the question is, if this isn't a bad example for other states too: If they think have to do something good, the even might do it in the future if it is not lawful, because the NATO 1999 has given an example that you are allowed to do so.

There is no doubt at all that it would have been better if the security council had been able to authorize military action. The UN secretary general Kofi Annan has said as much. But you have here, he said, two conflicting considerations: the need to take action to prevent these large scale violations of human rights and the need to respect the primacy of the security council. The problem was, the security council could not act in these circumstances. Although the security council undoubtedly has the primary role and is the best means for dealing with these situations, I do not believe that at the end of the 20th century we are still at the point where, so long as a state committing atrocities against its own people has a sponsor on the security council which is willing to use the veto on its behalf, that international law prohibits everybody else from intervening. To say that faced with violations of human rights from a greater scale possible even with genocide in a given case, the outside world is banned from doing anything about it if one of the permanent five members of the security council causes or threatens a negative vote. That would be an extraordinarily restricted concept of international law. So I don't accept the basis premise of your question. I don't accept this was a case where for moral reasons the rules and procedures of international law were sidestepped. I don't think the rules and procedures of international law required states to follow only the security council path, no matter what the consequences.

There are a lot of places, where many people get killed or human rights get violated extensively in the world. There are some cases of humanitarian crisis - and no one is intervening. What does it mean if there is no such principle as to treat equal situations equally? Isn't there a danger of arbitrary use of power? That means: Humanitarian intervention is only made, if there are interests of the powerful nations at stake - and the humanitarian crisis only is taken as a excuse for being able to intervene?

I think the consequences of the Kosovo intervention for international law will generally be positive ones. I think that it strengthened the case, along with earlier practice like Liberia and Iraq, for a right of intervention as a last resort. And the very fact that it has strengthened that right in customary international law makes it more likely that the security council will be able to take action in the future because a state contemplating casting a veto will know that veto will not necessarily be the end of the matter. As for the other question you pose - that is, if we intervene in Kosovo, should we not also intervene in all these other cases - Kosovo was exceptional, the threat to life there was very considerable. But you also have to keep in mind that it is simply not possible for states, particularly not for the European countries, to intervene anywhere in the world whenever they wish to do so, even if the law permits them to do so. As the British prime minister Tony Blair said in a recent speech, the fact that we cannot take action in all cases should not prevent us from acting in those cases where we can do something positive. International law does not impose a duty of intervention but a right. It legitimizes intervention, allows states to intervene in these extreme circumstances, it doesn't say that they have an obligation to do so, or if they don't do so in all cases, then that right will disappear.

But that could lead to double-standards: The allied of the big powerful nations can breach human rights law, like for example the long-time ally of the West Indonesia does. But so called jerk-countries as FRY have to face intervention as a consequence of their human rights violating behaviour? Human rights so more and more become norms that empower certain states to do things, they weren`t until then not allowed to do.

No, there are no different standards in international law, there is a single standard. And I don't accept that it imposes a particularly hard standard on some countries as you put it. Look, we are here not talking about those roles of international law that requires states for example to provide a proper standard of health care or anything like that, we are talking about prohibitions which every state in the world has accepted countless times and which every state in the world is capable of adhering to. The fact that a state is small or poor cannot legitimize torture or mass murder.

If one looks at the situation now, especially the high acceptance of humanitarian intervention to secure human rights, I must think of the Sixties. Then it seemed as a matter of course that, like in Vietnam, to intervene in order to secure freedom and democracy, to avoid communism. Which is the difference between these two types of intervention?

I think Vietnam is a whole world away from the events we are looking at the moment. It was very much a problem to the cold war period, it was a product of an era when a great many people saw the world as a centre for a conflict between two different value-systems, the communist and the democratic. Now, that is not the issue we are looking at today. The sort of human rights principles that the right of humanitarian intervention protects are universal rights, universal values, the values which have been accepted by every state in the world when it has become party to treaties of Genocide Convention, the international convention of civil and political rights, the Geneva conventions on the laws of war. It is not a case of the values of the west being set up against the values of other groups or states. This sets humanitarian intervention well apart from situations like Vietnam or the intervention in Grenada or the Suez crisis or any of the other conflicts of the cold war period.

Saying we deal with universal principles the question arises, which are the prerequistes that have to be fulfilled before a humanitarian intervention can take place? What are the requests we have how the operation is to be runned to be regarded as legitimate? For example: Isn`t it necessary that the rules of law are perfectly applied by the intervening forces? And did the NATO do so, when they bombed the Serb TV station or the bridges over the Danube or refugee trecks? It seemed to me, and not only to me, that the NATO warfare was hardly compatible to the Geneva Conventions and the Additional Protocols, since the discrimination of civil aims and military aims wasn`t very consequent.

You are absolutely right that where states resort to force for whatever reason and certainly including humanitarian intervention, it is imperative that they comply with the Geneva conventions, the Geneva protocol, if that is applicable, and the rest of humanitarian law. So they must conduct their operations in a way which is itself lawful. Humanitarian intervention doesn't give them a right to override those restrictions. But now, if you look at the practical examples, what are these rules? First of all, the attacks must be limited to military objectives. Of course, you have to keep mind in that that there is always the possibility of a mistake, there is always going to be a situation in wartime where the officer who orders an attack has wrongly identified the target, frequently through no fault of his own, but because the information available was not complete. Secondly in attacking a military objective every care has got to be taken not to cause collateral civilian casualties, not to injure civilians in the course of that attack. But some collateral damage und collateral injury is I am afraid unavoidable. That is a fact of life. It's been a fact of life in warfare ever since the invention of high explosives. So, I agree entirely that the Nato states had to comply with these standards. From what I have seen, every effort was made to comply with the requirements of humanitarian law in the course of the bombardment.

Looking at the bomb attacks against the Serb TV station that does not seem so to me. And there is a group of international lawyers from Greece, Canada, Italy and other states, who even think, the ICTY should investigate the NATOs warfare ...

Well, I think it depends entirely on what information those who decided on that attack had got. If that television station was being used as a means of military control within Kosovo, then it would be in a very different position from the TV-studio where you and I are sitting now. If you take an example from Ruanda. The radio station in Ruanda was broadcasting the most extreme hate-propaganda right the way through the genocide in 1994. And it was actually being used as a means of directing killers to their victims. Now, I am not saying that this was happening in the case of the TV-station in Belgrade, but if you had something like that happening, then that radio or television station would have been a perfectly legitimate target.

There is another problem with the type of intervention, the NATO realised. The humanitarian situation in Kosovo didn`t turn out very good. Now it`s the Serbs and especially the Roma that have to flee and that are attacked and murdered by Kosovaran. Amnesty International has placed some complaints about the development and the fact that KFOR doesn't stop it. And it doesn't look like the situation would become more peaceful in the nearer future. What does that mean for the concept of humanitarian intervention? Does that mean, the troops always have to stay there as long as the situation isn`t peaceful? Or is there a possibility to pull the troops out again?

I would certainly not defend the attacks on members of the Serb population taking place in Kosovo now. But those attacks are not being carried out by KFOR. On the contrary, they are something which Kfor is doing its best to prevent, but of course you realize that it is exceptionally difficult to do that. We have all seen too many cases, for example in Northern Ireland, of the difficulty of an army trying to keep the peace between two warring communities. As far how long the Kfor states are going to have to stay there, I think, it is impossible to say.