Defence & Strategy

The paper deals with the concept of humanitarian intervention. To make an intervention into interior affairs of a country for humanitarian reasons is one of the most complex legal and political issues regarding contemporary relations in the international community. There is no doubt that a serious violation of human rights, genocide, and racial, national and religious discrimination on a large scale make the international community intervention necessary. However, the previous as well as current practice shows that humanitarian reasons are often used as a pretext for an intervention with entirely different goals - often directly counterpoising to the reasons of humaneness, thus placing the whole humanitarian intervention concept under a serious suspicion.The paper presents a few characteristic examples in an attempt to shed light on the concept of humanitarian intervention.