When International Law Fails to Protect: Humanitarian Intervention and the Iranian Repression

[Oded Hen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Bar-Ilan University. His research focuses on moral philosophy, particularly just war theory and the ethics of modern warfare. His work addresses questions of civilian immunity, legitimate targeting, moral responsibility, and the application of normative principles in contemporary asymmetric conflicts]

This post examines the legal and moral responsibilities of the international community when a state engages in large-scale violence against its own population. It argues that the Iranian crisis reveals a stark gap between the moral duty to protect civilians and the restrictive structure of the UN Charter system, raising the question of whether moral necessity can justify action in the absence of Security Council authorization.

The Iranian Repression beginning in late December 2025 and intensifying throughout January 2026, widespread demonstrations erupted across Iran, rapidly evolving into one of the most consequential episodes of domestic unrest in the Islamic Republic’s recent history. What initially appeared to be socio-economic protests soon developed into a sustained and explicitly political challenge to the regime’s authority. As documented by international media and human rights organizations, including reports by Human Rights Watch, the state’s response was rapid, centralized, and coercive, reflecting not ad hoc crowd control but coordinated repression on a national scale.

Credible reporting indicates that security forces used live ammunition against demonstrators, conducted mass arrests across multiple provinces, imposed communications blackouts, and employed intimidation tactics extending well beyond street-level confrontation. Particularly troubling were accounts that repression extended into medical institutions. Reports from human rights monitors described security personnel entering hospitals, monitoring or detaining wounded protesters, intimidating medical staff, and interfering with treatment in order to prevent documentation of injuries inflicted during demonstrations. These measures were widespread and systematic. Tens of thousands were reportedly detained, and expedited judicial proceedings, including death sentences following summary trials, as documented by Amnesty International.

Casualty figures remain contested. Iranian authorities acknowledged more than 3,000 deaths in official communications, according to reporting by AP News. However, independent monitoring organizations, investigative journalists, and exile-based documentation groups have reported dramatically higher numbers. By late February 2026, several credible sources estimated that total fatalities had exceeded 30,000, with some assessments ranging between 30,000 and 40,000, as reported by The Guardian. These figures place the repression among the deadliest episodes of state violence against civilians in recent decades.

The international response has been prompt yet institutionally constrained. The United Nations Human Rights Council convened special sessions to address the situation in Iran and extended investigative mandates to examine alleged violations related to the protests. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights publicly called for an immediate cessation of lethal force against demonstrators, demanded transparency in judicial processes, and warned against further executions. Several states, including members of the European Union, imposed targeted sanctions on Iranian officials and institutions allegedly responsible for the crackdown. These measures included asset freezes, travel bans, and financial restrictions. Sanctions serve both expressive and instrumental functions: they publicly condemn unlawful conduct and raise the economic and political costs of repression. However, they do not immediately halt ongoing violence, nor do they resolve the underlying structural problem of enforcement when atrocity crimes are alleged. A politically significant development occurred on January 13, 2026, when the President of the United States publicly declared that “help is on the way,” a statement widely reported in international media, including Time and The Wall Street Journal, and interpreted by many observers as signaling forthcoming military action.

The Structural Limits of Humanitarian Intervention

Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter prohibits the “threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” This rule stands at the core of the post-1945 international legal order and is widely regarded as one of its most authoritative principles. The International Court of Justice has also affirmed, in its judgment in the Nicaragua v. United States (Paras 188-190) case, that the prohibition on the use of force reflected in Article 2(4) constitutes a rule of customary international law binding on all states. The Charter provides only two recognized exceptions: the inherent right of self-defense under Article 51 in response to an armed attack, and the use of force authorized by the Security Council under Chapter VII. Internal repression, however grave or systematic, does not ordinarily qualify as an armed attack against another state within the meaning of Article 51. For that reason, humanitarian intervention undertaken without Security Council authorization lacks a clear legal foundation within the Charter framework, as discussed by Oona Hathaway and co-authors.

This structure reflects deliberate institutional design. The Charter system emerged from the devastation of global war and was intended to prevent unilateral recourse to force by centralizing enforcement authority in the Security Council. The allocation of primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security to that body, including the veto power of its permanent members, formed part of a political compromise designed to secure the participation of the great powers in collective security. The resulting architecture privileges interstate stability and collective authorization over unilateral humanitarian enforcement. The difficulty of responding decisively to internal atrocities when the Council is divided is therefore not an accidental defect, but a structural feature of the system.

The 1999 intervention in Kosovo illustrates this tension. NATO launched military action to halt ethnic cleansing against Kosovar Albanians without explicit authorization from the Security Council. Many observers regarded the intervention as morally justified, yet legally contentious. It was frequently described as an exceptional response to extreme circumstances rather than as evidence of a general legal acceptance of a customary exception permitting unilateral humanitarian intervention, a characterization reflected in contemporary assessments by the American Society of International Law and later by the Independent International Commission on Kosovo.

At the 2005 World Summit, heads of state and government endorsed the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), clarifying that sovereignty entails a duty to safeguard a state’s population rather than an unfettered right to govern without external accountability. Paragraphs 138–139 of the World Summit Outcome Document specify that each state bears the primary responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. Where national authorities “manifestly fail” to fulfill this obligation, the international community, acting through the United Nations, is prepared to take collective action.

Crucially, however, R2P explicitly situates coercive measures within the Charter framework, specifying that collective action must be taken “through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII.” As explained by Oona Hathaway and her co-authors, the doctrine does not authorize unilateral uses of force. In the Iranian case, therefore, even if the threshold of widespread and systematic violence amounting to crimes against humanity were met, enforcement action would require Security Council authorization to be clearly lawful under the Charter. Without such authorization, unilateral intervention would be legally inconsistent with Article 2(4).

Moral Justification and the Sovereignty Problem

Humanitarian intervention occupies a distinctive position within just war theory: it is among the most morally compelling yet legally precarious categories of war. While the paradigm just cause remains self-defense against external aggression, some theorists extend the underlying logic of defense to include other-defense, that is, the use of force to protect victims of aggression who are unable to defend themselves, a view developed by Jeff McMahan. Some scholars have  interpreted humanitarian intervention as a form of collective other-defense, extending the logic of self-defense to the protection of vulnerable populations, as argued by George Fletcher and Jens Ohlin. Humanitarian intervention falls within this extended category: it involves crossing borders without the consent of the territorial government in order to protect its population from internal violence amounting to mass atrocity.

These wars often appear morally admirable. Preventing genocide, ethnic cleansing, or systematic crimes against humanity presents what seems to be a paradigmatic just cause. Michael Walzer famously argued that when a government engages in “massacre” or “enslavement” (Just and Unjust Wars, pp. 86–108), it may forfeit its claim against external interference. The moral reaction provoked by images of large-scale atrocities, such as those in Rwanda in 1994 and Srebrenica in 1995, renders inaction morally troubling. The idea of “standing by” in the face of systematic killing appears incompatible with the protective function that underlies the moral justification of political authority. Yet despite this intuitive moral appeal, states have frequently refrained from intervening even when atrocities were extensively documented, underscoring the persistent gap between moral , obligations, and political practice.

This gap becomes especially visible once the moral argument is set against the legal structure of the international order. The first major tension concerns sovereignty. The jus ad bellum framework embedded in the UN Charter is structured to protect territorial integrity and political independence, with sovereignty functioning as a cornerstone of the international order. Humanitarian intervention, however, appears to violate that principle by disregarding a state’s control over its borders. One proposed response is consent-based humanitarian intervention, in which external assistance is provided with the authorization of the territorial government in order to reconcile humanitarian protection with the legal prohibition on the use of force, a possibility raised by Oona Hathaway and her co-authors. A stricter legal position, however, treats sovereignty as inviolable and therefore maintains that unilateral humanitarian intervention remains incompatible with the UN Charter framework, even when undertaken for humanitarian purposes, a position defended by Yoram Dinstein, Christine Gray, and Marko Milanovic.

An alternative account defends a conception of conditional sovereignty, arguing that sovereignty is justified only to the extent that governments protect the fundamental rights of their populations. When a regime systematically violates or fails to protect those rights, particularly in cases of genocide or crimes against humanity, it forfeits the moral basis of its sovereign claim. Under such conditions, intervention does not override legitimate sovereignty, because sovereignty has already morally collapsed, a position defended by Fernando Tesón and James Pattison. This line of thought also aligns with the shift articulated in the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document (R2P), which reframed sovereignty as responsibility rather than privilege. This conception of conditional sovereignty is normatively compelling because it grounds the legitimacy of political authority in its protective function: a state that systematically attacks its own population cannot coherently claim the protections designed to enable it to fulfill that function.

However, critics caution that humanitarian intervention may be vulnerable to abuse if states invoke humanitarian rhetoric as a pretext for geopolitical objectives. Historical examples, including humanitarian interventions that served primarily strategic interests, lend weight to this concern. For this reason, strict limiting criteria and institutional safeguards are often emphasized when evaluating claims of humanitarian intervention, a concern discussed by Simon Chesterman and Alex Bellamy. The Iranian case is particularly susceptible to this critique, given the longstanding strategic tensions between Iran and the intervening states, and the targeting of nuclear infrastructure alongside regime elements associated with repression. Just war theory further requires that humanitarian intervention satisfy the traditional jus ad bellum criteria of necessity and proportionality, as reflected in Walzer’s and McMahan’s accounts. In the Iranian case, necessity would require demonstrating that non-military measures, including the sanctions already imposed, had proven insufficient to halt the repression and that no reasonable alternative remained. Proportionality would demand that the scale and nature of military action be calibrated to the humanitarian objective rather than to broader strategic aims.

Concluding Remarks

The moral justification of humanitarian intervention is marked by deep internal tension. In the absence of Security Council authorization or a valid claim of self-defense under Article 51, humanitarian intervention lacks a clear legal basis under the Charter. However, the protection of civilians subjected to mass atrocity generates a powerful moral claim grounded in the defense of the innocent, and in exceptional circumstances, such intervention may be morally justified even in the face of legal prohibition.

The events of February 28, 2026, bring this tension into sharp focus. On that date, the United States and Israel asserted a moral duty when they launched large-scale strikes against Iranian regime targets, including elements of its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, which both states characterized as posing an imminent strategic threat. Senior U.S. officials, including Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, justified the operation as necessary to prevent an imminent danger posed by Iran’s strategic capabilities, thereby invoking anticipatory self-defense and arguing that the use of force was required to avert an impending attack.

At the same time, the broader objective of regime change, along with the expectation that, during the war, the Iranian people would once again take to the streets in an effort to overthrow the rule of the ayatollahs, remained a primary goal aimed at ending this brutal regime. Addressing the Iranian people, President Trump declared that “the hour of your freedom is at hand”, according to an official statement released by the White House, and implicitly appealed to the logic of humanitarian intervention as a morally defensible basis for the use of force, alongside the military operation aimed at neutralizing the immediate threat.

This dual framing, combining anticipatory self-defense with implicit humanitarian justification, complicates legal and moral assessment. The two rationales rest on distinct normative foundations: one concerns the defending state’s security interests, while the other concerns the protection of a foreign population from its own government. Whether the humanitarian dimension can independently justify the intervention, absent the self-defense claim, remains a separate question that this analysis seeks to address.

What some scholars characterize as “manifestly illegal,” as argued by Marko Milanovic, and others attempt to explain as “illegal but legitimate,” as suggested by Yuval Shany and Amichai Cohen, raises the question of whether moral necessity can override legal prohibition. If the humanitarian justification is accepted, the Iranian case may represent an instance in which moral considerations expose the structural limits of the existing legal framework. It presents a paradigmatic instance in which moral judgment should prevail, revealing the structural limits of an international legal system that struggles to respond decisively to large-scale repression and to ensure protection for a suppressed population subjected to violence by its own regime.