Human Rights as a Justification for War

Author: Jasper Kelsey

April 29, 2026

UN peacekeepers patrol the streets in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo [Image credit: Safi Erneste via Pexels]

The modern history of human rights is inextricably tied to war and international conflict. Following the atrocities carried out during World War II, and the establishment of the United Nations, the international community affirmed that humanity possesses inherent rights that must be protected. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights codified this commitment in 1948. Thus, the universalization of human rights emerged as a response to the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II and the desire to ensure such events never happened again. Since World War II, human rights have remained central to the international order. This principle shapes how states act on the international stage.  This article focuses specifically on how states use human rights discourse to pursue political goals through military intervention.

United States

The foreign policy of the Trump administration has been particularly interventionist in its second term, taking military action in Central and South America as well as the Middle East. In each case, the administration justified the use of force as necessary to protect human rights. 

On January 3, 2026, the Trump administration launched an attack on Venezuela that resulted in the capture and extradition of Nicolas Maduro and his wife to New York in order to face criminal charges. The attack reflected an increasingly aggressive foreign policy towards Venezuela, including aerial strikes against boats in the Caribbean that the administration claimed were smuggling drugs into the U.S. Officials justified these actions as necessary to protect the human rights of U.S. and Venezuelan citizens. The primary charge against the Maduro administration is its role in trafficking drugs into the U.S., threatening American lives and livelihoods. Officials also justified the intervention as an effort to restore democracy and free Venezuelans from an authoritarian regime responsible for widespread human rights abuses. 

While these actions unfolded in South America, protests erupted in Iran, the largest anti-government demonstrations since 2009. These protests resulted in 5,777 verified protestor deaths, with potentially thousands more. In response, the Trump administration began laying the groundwork for a larger military action. Trump warned Iran that if violent action were taken against protestors, the U.S. military would intervene to “rescue Iranians.” Although the administration did not immediately follow through, two months later, on February 28, 2026, the U.S. and its ally, Israel, launched a military campaign against the Iranian government. While the purported rationale behind this attack is shifting and complicated, the attack was launched alongside discourse reminiscent of that from a couple months earlier. Both Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump framed this military action as liberatory and called on the Iranian people to rise up and take the opportunity to overthrow the repressive regime.

In both cases, the Trump administration’s appeals to human rights, democracy, and freedom appear inconsistent with the stated strategic goals of the interventions. Taking a much more central role in the attack on Venezuela is the Trump administration’s desire to control the nation’s oil reserves and other natural resources. Claims of protecting the lives of American citizens from the importation of drugs are put into question as Trump’s claims about Venezuela’s connections to South American cartels, and the number of lives saved by blowing up boats in the Caribbean, are debunked. Furthermore, the Trump administration’s appeals to human rights appear contradictory when considering the government’s own human rights abuses, ranging from the domestic murder of its own citizens and immigrants, to war crimes such as extrajudicial aerial executions in the Caribbean and the bombing of a girls’ school in Iran.

Such appeals to human rights are not new in 21^st century U.S. military history. The century began with similar claims of human rights abuses and calls to action by the U.S. government in the context of Iraq. In the lead-up to the war, the Bush administration relied heavily on the human rights abuses committed by the regime of Saddam Hussein, citing them as a reason for the necessity of U.S. intervention. Today, many analysts argue that the U.S. invaded Iraq on false pretenses and that these appeals to morality were an effort to get the public to sign off on unpopular military action. Again, this rationale was used in Barack Obama’s decision to intervene in Libya and against the government of Muanmar Qaddafi. Nearly every U.S. administration of the 21^st century has justified violent foreign policy on the grounds of protecting human rights.

Russian Federation

The Russian Federation under Vladimir Putin has conducted violent interventions against several neighboring states. The invasion of Ukraine remains the most significant contemporary example. Putin has consistently justified these actions by claiming Russia must protect the human rights of ethnic Russians living in targeted territories.

In February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine that continues to this day. By 2025, more than one million people had died in the conflict, with many more missing. Multiple national governments, genocide experts, and international organizations have accused Russia of genocide. The Russian government itself has levied its own, much less credible accusations of genocide against Ukraine, claiming that the Ukrainian government has been guilty of a series of actions against ethnic Russians living in Ukraine. Just days before the invasion, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a speech, accusing the Ukrainian government of various crimes and human rights violations. It was ultimately these claims of genocide that Russia would use to justify its invasion of Ukraine, and its annexation of the Donbas region. 

Russia’s accusations date back to 2014, when it annexed Crimea. Russia has created reports of human rights abuses and genocide in the Donbas region since 2014, claiming that the Ukrainian government was responsible for a concerted effort to kill ethnic Russians in the area. These claims of human rights abuses against ethnic Russians were used to justify this annexation of Crimea, as well as Russia’s support for separatist fighters in the Donbas. The situation in Ukraine is not the only time the Russian government has used claims of genocide to carry out violent foreign policy actions. In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia in support of South Ossetia and Abkhaz separatists, claiming that the Georgian forces were committing genocide against ethnic Russians in Georgia. Then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev described scenes of genocidal behavior, making the claim that the Georgian government killed thousands of South Ossetians, citing these supposed deaths as the main reason Russia sent troops into the region.

In each case, the Russian government has relied on human rights discourse to legitimize military action. Putin portrayed Russia as the only power capable of stopping an alleged genocide. Russia even attempted to formalize these accusations legally, bringing claims of genocide before the European Court of Human Rights in 2021. Russia claimed that “nationalist battalions” in the Donbas were committing atrocities there. Observers debate Russia's motivations, from imperial ambitions to concerns about NATO expansion and economic interests. Regardless of these motives, Russia's human rights claims appear questionable given its own record of abuses and the limited evidence supporting its accusations against Ukraine and Georgia.

Israel and the War on Gaza

Israel’s existence has often been justified by the claim that only a sovereign Jewish state can guarantee the human rights and security of the Jewish people. Human rights discourse has therefore remained central to Israel’s political identity. This does not mean Israel consistently upholds human rights; rather, such language frequently appears in official justifications of state action. The current war on Gaza illustrates how the Israeli government frames military action as necessary to protect Jewish human rights.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched an attack on Israel that produced the largest loss of Jewish life since Israel’s independence. Approximately 1,200 Israelis were killed and around 240 were taken hostage and transported to Gaza. The crimes committed that day were widespread and constitute a clear atrocity. However, the attack also marked the beginning of a much larger conflict that continues today. In response, Israel launched a large-scale offensive in Gaza, a densely populated territory. By 2025,  more than 70,000 Palestinians had been killed. Israel’s war on Gaza has been credibly described as genocide by national governments, genocide experts, and international human rights organizations. Israel, on the other hand, has rejected these accusations and instead claims that the actions it has taken in Gaza are necessary for the survival of the Jewish state and the fate of the Jewish people. Netanyahu has framed the war as existential, likening Hamas to the Nazis and referring to them as “genocidal.” 

Israel is unique among the cases discussed here because the protection of Jewish human rights forms a foundational justification for the state itself.  As a result, this rationale has appeared repeatedly in Israeli military policy. Israel’s 1956 intervention against Egypt was justified as necessary due to Egypt’s desire to annihilate the state of Israel. Nearly a decade later, another Israeli prime minister reiterated similar claims to justify Israel’s second attack on Egypt in the Six-Day War, claiming that Egypt had wanted to destroy Israel and that a second Holocaust had been prevented through Israeli military intervention. Israel’s multiple interventions in Lebanon, including today’s current invasion, have been justified on the grounds that groups in Lebanon posed an existential threat to the lives of the Jewish people in Israel. Before the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Prime Minister Menachem Begin compared the Palestine Liberation Organization to Nazi Germany and argued Israel must act to prevent another Treblinka. 

Protestors with Palestinian flags [Image credit: Mohammed Abubakr via Pexels]

Why Do States Use Human Rights as Justification For War?

The cases above establish a firm pattern of states using the discourse of human rights in order to justify wider military action to achieve specific political goals. It is now not a question of whether states do this, but why. 

While universal human rights were established as an international goal at the end of the Second World War, it is not a coincidence that more wars were justified on humanitarian grounds at the turn of the 21^st century. Prior to the end of the Cold War, wars were much more often framed within the ideological struggle between the Soviet Union and the U.S. For the U.S., wars like Vietnam and Korea were about stopping the spread of the Soviet Union’s influence, as is evident from a foreign policy based on the “domino effect,” where it was feared that if one country became communist, the countries surrounding it would change as well. As for the Soviet Union, under the Brezhnev Doctrine, military intervention was clearly defended on an ideological basis, stating that the Soviet Union would intervene in countries where communist governments or movements were threatened. 

With the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the ideological rationale behind foreign intervention no longer carried the same weight. Now the U.S. no longer had its main ideological enemy against  whom it had waged a series of proxy wars since the end of the Second World War. However, the fall of the Soviet Union alone does not explain why the discourse of human rights protection would take the place of ideology in the justification of military intervention. The fall of the Soviet Union had wide-ranging implications for the international community, one of them being the creation of a series of new nation-states. In one particularly bloody moment of nation birth, the idea of humanitarian military intervention took hold: the breakup of Yugoslavia and the ensuing violence.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia would hold a series of elections in which the communist party that had been ruling the nation lost its power to a series of ethnic separatist parties. The resulting wins by these groups would lead to the secession of multiple regions of Yugoslavia and the formation of new ethnic states. The process of secession was complicated and bloody, with several wars breaking out between the new states, the old Yugoslav government, and ethnic nationalist groups. By the late 1990s, it was clear that a fully-fledged genocide was taking place in the region, as the remaining Yugoslav state sought to ethnically cleanse the region of Albanians during the Kosovo War. The world was watching while the genocide unfolded, and in 1999, NATO forces made the decision to intervene on the basis of ending the humanitarian disaster.

NATO intervention in Yugoslavia can be considered the first major war of the post-World War II international system in which major military action was justified on human rights grounds. As with most wars, the reason why military action was taken can be disputed; some may say the intervention was nothing more than NATO expansionism. However, the reality or truth of the justification is not important here. What is important is the fact that this was the first time that the discourse of human rights was utilized in a way to justify foreign military intervention. This discourse would be so powerful that, following the end of the intervention, an entirely new international commitment would be discussed and adopted by the international community, referred to as the Responsibility to Protect, which calls on the international community to intervene in the affairs of states when they fail to adequately protect the human rights of their population. Thus, humanitarian military intervention was given a form of legal and normative justification.

With the emergence of this doctrine, states increasingly sought to align military actions with humanitarian justifications in order to legitimize their policies.  As discussed earlier, the Obama administration invoked these arguments when intervening in Libya, while Russia used similar rhetoric in Georgia.  Human rights discourse therefore provides states with a powerful tool: it allows them to frame military intervention as morally legitimate while avoiding the perception of outright aggression.

Conclusion

Universal human rights represent a noble ideal worth defending. The belief that all people possess unalienable rights is one of humanity's most significant moral achievements. It is therefore understandable why many support doctrines that allow military intervention to prevent atrocities. Yet the cases examined above demonstrate how easily governments can manipulate this principle for political purposes. If war is readily justified in the name of human rights, military conflict itself may cease to appear as an affront to humanity. This raises difficult questions. Can human rights truly be defended through war? If interventions justified in their name produce further suffering, can they still be considered legitimate? Answering these questions lies beyond the scope of this article. Nevertheless, they remain essential if the international community hopes to prevent noble ideals from becoming tools that legitimize further violence.

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Glossary

• Annexation: The formal incorporation of territory into another state.

• Authoritarian Regime: A system of government characterized by concentrated political power, limited political pluralism, and restrictions on individual freedoms.

• Debunked: To expose the falseness or lack of evidence behind a claim or belief.

• Discourse: A mode of organizing knowledge, ideas, or experience rooted in language and its institutional or historical contexts.

• Ethnic Cleansing: The attempt to create ethnically homogeneous geographic areas through deportation, displacement, or violence against other ethnic groups.

• Ethnic Nationalism: An ideology that ties national identity to ancestry or ethnic heritage and asserts that political authority should correspond to that identity. 

• Ethnic State: A state dominated politically and culturally by a single ethnic group.

• Extradition: The return of someone accused of a crime to the country where the crime was committed.

• Extrajudicial Executions: The deliberate killing of an individual by a state agent (or with state consent) without a prior judicial process or legal judgment.

• False Pretenses: False representations concerning past or present facts made with the intent to defraud another.

• Holocaust: The genocide of approximately six million Jewish people and other ethnic minority groups carried out by Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1945.

• Humanitarian Disaster: A situation in which human, economic, or environmental damage from an event overwhelms a community’s capacity to respond.

• Humanitarian Military Intervention: The use of military force by external actors to stop large-scale human rights abuses or humanitarian crises within another state.

• Ideology: A set of political beliefs or principles that guide a political system, party, or organization.

• Imperialism/Imperialist: The policy or practice of extending the power and influence of a nation, especially through territorial acquisition or political and economic dominance.

• Interventionism:The theory or practice of intervening, particularly governmental interference in economic affairs at home or in political affairs of another country.

• Irredentist: A political movement advocating the return of territory considered historically or ethnically connected to a particular state.

• Liberatory: Intended to free people from perceived oppression or political domination.

• Military Campaign: The planning and implementation of large-scale and long-term military operations aimed at achieving specific strategic objectives.

• Nation-state: A territorially bounded sovereign state governed in the name of a population that identifies as a nation.

• Proxy War: A conflict in which external powers support opposing sides in order to influence the outcome without directly fighting each other.

• Rationale: The reasons or intentions that explain or justify the cause of a particular set of beliefs or actions.

• Separatist: A member of a political or ethnic group within a state who seeks independence or political separation from the existing government.

• United Nations: An international organization founded in 1945, created to provide a forum where states address international issues and coordinate collective action.