Contingent sovereignty

Sovereignty

Sovereignty is the quality of having supreme, independent authority over a geographic area, such as a territory. It can be found in a power to rule and make law that rests on a political fact for which no purely legal explanation can be provided...

refers to the new and still evolving theory which challenges the norm of non-intervention in the internal affairs of countries, commonly associated with the Westphalian doctrine of sovereignty

Westphalian sovereignty

Westphalian sovereignty is the concept of nation-state sovereignty based on two things: territoriality and the absence of a role for external agents in domestic structures....

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Stewart Patrick of the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 State Department has described the contingent sovereignty as follows.

Historically, the main obstacle to armed intervention -humanitarian or otherwise- has been the doctrine of sovereignty, which prohibits violating the territorial integrity of another state. One of the striking developments of the past decade has been an erosion of this non-intervention norm and the rise of a nascent doctrine of “contingent sovereignty.”

This school of thought holds that sovereign rights and immunities are not absolute. They depend on the observance of fundamental state obligations. These include the responsibility to protect the citizens of the state. When a regime makes war on its people or cannot prevent atrocities against them, it risks forfeiting its claim to non-intervention. In such circumstances, the responsibility to protect may devolve to the international community.

This emerging consensus reflects the traumas of the twentieth century. The seminal event was the Holocaust, but it was hardly the last to shock the conscience of humankind. From the killing fields of Cambodia to the bloody hills of Rwanda, a litany of atrocities has mocked our earnest, repeated pledges of 'Never Again.'

Following the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan described what he termed a "developing international norm ... that massive and systematic violations of human rights wherever they may take place ... should not be allowed to stand." No longer should frontiers be considered an absolute defense behind which states can commit crimes against humanity with "sovereign impunity."

The concept of contingent sovereignty is evolving and currently not codified in international law.

Criticism

Critics argue that the concept of contingent sovereignty allows powerful countries, such as the United States, too much scope to invade other countries based in their own judgements about the human rights

Human rights

Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...

 abuses or other wrongdoing of the government of the country concerned.

See also

• Responsibility to protect
  Responsibility to protect
  The responsibility to protect is a norm or set of principles based on the idea that sovereignty is not a privilege, but a responsibility. RtoP focuses on preventing and halting four crimes: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing, which it places under the generic...
  
  
• Humanitarian intervention
  Humanitarian intervention
  Humanitarian intervention "refers to a state using military force against another state when the chief publicly declared aim of that military action is ending human-rights violations being perpetrated by the state against which it is directed."...
  
  
• Sovereignty
  Sovereignty
  Sovereignty is the quality of having supreme, independent authority over a geographic area, such as a territory. It can be found in a power to rule and make law that rests on a political fact for which no purely legal explanation can be provided...
  
  
• Just War theory