Law Commons^™

Nato Intervention On Trial: The Legal Case That Was Never Made, Paul Williams, Michael Scharff

Paul Williams

The United States and its NATO allies have defended the air strikes against Yugoslavia on moral grounds (to stop atrocities) and security grounds (to prevent the conflict from spilling over to neighboring European countries), but curiously they have never articulated a legal justification for the intervention. The nearest the NATO countries have come to articulating a legal rationale has been to cite various resolutions of the Security Council, in which the Council has determined that the actions of Yugoslavia in Kosovo constitute a threat to peace and security in the region and, pursuant to Chapter VII of the UN Charter, …