Justice and Development Party (JDP) came to power in Turkey at a time when the “responsibility to protect” appeared as a concept on the international agenda. Emphasizing multilateralism and humanitarian diplomacy among the principles of “new” Turkish foreign policy, JDP has constantly supported the concept on international platforms, mostly referring to the “responsibility to prevent” as the most important pillar of it. When the Arab Spring reached Libya with anti-government demonstrations in February 2011, forceful actions of Gaddafi regime against the protestors showed that the crisis would not end up with a peaceful democratic transition. Alarmed by the Libyan opposition to become “the saviour”, the international community did not hesitate to invoke the “responsibility to protect” through Resolutions 1970 and 1973. Yet these decisions had challenging repercussions on Turkish foreign policy. Turkey increasingly felt the pressure of its bilateral relations with Libya, its claim to be a regional power, and its responsibilities under international law. This paper aims to analyse Turkey’s responsibility to protect policy in Libya and whether its policy was in tandem with that of international community. For this purpose, Turkey’s policy vis-à-vis the Libyan crisis is examined through a qualitative analysis of official discourse by Ministry of Foreign Affairs and National Security Council together with the statements of policymakers to the foreign press. The study concludes that Turkey has fulfilled its responsibility to protect in Libya and acted in the spirit of “responsibility to protect” even at times the international community explicitly failed to so. For this reason, Turkey’s policy was not in line with the international community in every pillar of the norm. Yet Turkey’s insistence to design and lead the process in line with its own foreign policy preferences prevented Ankara from being the “quarterback” in Libya.
Following a number of events including the sweeping revolutionary trends in North African countries of Tunisia and Egypt (the Arab Spring), the Libyan people on February 15, 2011 began a series of peaceful protests which were met with violent responses by the government. The protests escalated into an uprising that spread across the country with the forces opposing Gaddafi establishing a government based in Benghazi named the National Transitional Council whose goal is to overthrow the Gaddafi-led government and hold democratic elections. The Gaddafi regime brutally and violently responded by attacking the protesters killing many civilians with rising number of casualties raising humanitarian concerns, which on grounds of humanitarian intervention or responsibility to protect doctrine, ultimately necessitated the imposition of no-fly zone by the UNSC. The study concludes that the implementation of no-fly zone worsens rather than ameliorates the humanitarian conditions in Libya.
Over the past several decades, states have used international asset freezes with increasing frequency as a mechanism for promoting human rights abroad. Yet the international law governing this mechanism, which I refer to as ‘humanitarian financial intervention,’ remains fragmented. This article offers the first systematic legal analysis of humanitarian financial intervention. It identifies six humanitarian purposes that states may pursue through asset freezes: preserving foreign assets from misappropriation, incapacitating foreign states or foreign nationals, coercing foreign states or foreign nationals to forsake abusive practices, compensating victims, ameliorating humanitarian crises through humanitarian aid or post-conflict reconstruction, and punishing human rights violators. Whether intervening states may pursue these objectives in any given context depends upon the interplay between several international legal regimes, including international investment law, collective-security agreements such as the UN Charter, the customary law of countermeasures, the law of armed conflict, and customary law governing the enforcement of judicial decisions. By disentangling the various international legal regimes that govern humanitarian financial intervention, this article furnishes a preliminary road map for evaluating the legality of past, present, and future financial interventions — including asset freezes directed against the Qaddafi regime during the 2011 Libyan Revolution.
This article is based on a presentation given at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law in London on 25 October 2012 on the occasion of its Annual Conference and its theme for this year of “International Law, the Rule of Law and Constitutional Change.”
I must begin by saying that the topic of my presentation — ‘Massive Violations of Human Rights and the Use of Force’ in the context of the Arab Spring — was not one of personal design reached after moments of prolonged deliberation — but, rather, in a very good old-fashioned way, it was allocated to me by the conveners of the annual conference for the British Institute of International and Comparative Law. I volunteer this background fact only because I think it would be quite useful to commence by explaining some of the challenges associated with the formulation of ‘massive violations of human rights’ of the Arab Spring and then relating that matter to the ‘use of force’ — itself quite an instructive term because it does tend to delimit our thinking about how States and international organisations strategise toward chosen ends, when, as we know full well, threats of force have become a rather significant part of modern international relations and are deserving of the same critical scrutiny afforded to uses of force under the regimen of the Charter of the United Nations.