Argumentation and the Responsibility to Protect: The Case of Libya

On 18 March 2001, UN Security Council Res. 1973 enabled NATO forces to implement a protection of civilians mandate to limit the harm Muammar Gaddafi’s military could inflict on the armed uprising against his rule. After seven months of bombardment from sea and air, forces loyal to the National Transitional Council were able to topple the Gaddafi regime and install a new government. This short empirical description of the Libyan case just about exhausts the degree of consensus that exists about the intervention. The UN and its leading Member States were criticized before the authorized action for not responding quickly enough, for changing the mandate to the need to remove Gaddafi, and subsequently for turning a blind eye to atrocities performed by the anti-Gaddafi revolutionaries (Milne 2011; UN OHCHR 2012). This kind of contestation around interventions for humanitarian purposes flows directly from the tension between the legitimacy attributed to universal human rights and the relative weaknesses associated with their legal protection and redress (Habermas 1999), a topic widely canvassed in other chapters of this book.