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Monday, January 26, 2004

No humanitarian grounds for Iraq war - Human Rights Watch report
Bernard Hibbitts at 1:23 PM ET

The New York based monitoring group Human Rights Watch released its annual global survey on human rights and armed conflict Monday. In his keynote essay, HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth notes that although the organization ordinarily took no position on whether a given state should go to war, it could not accept the contention of the US and UK governments that the invasion of Iraq was humanitarian:
[R]emoving Saddam Hussein from power brought about the end of one of the world’s most abusive governments. But intervening militarily on the territory of a sovereign state, without its permission, is inherently dangerous and must be undertaken for humanitarian purposes in only the most extreme cases. While Saddam Hussein had an atrocious human rights record, his worst atrocities were committed long before the intervention. At the time coalition forces invaded Iraq, there was no ongoing or imminent mass killing of the sort that would require the kind of preventive military action that should characterize true humanitarian interventions.
The full 407-page report is online here. HRW also provides a press release.



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