Question

Find three interventions on Ebola

Answer 1

Military intervention and humanitarian intervention

The Ebola outbreak has been spreading like wildfire devouring everything in its path across West Africa. The customary international law has always recognized a principle of military intervention on humanitarian grounds. The classic examples of 19th-century ‘military humanitarian intervention’ history allow us to take a more skeptical view with regard to the interests at stake. Nonetheless, the theoretical and legal debate has been sophisticated. In the case of the Ebola outbreak, non-intervention – as in the case of a revolution which may sometimes snatch a remedy beyond the reach of law, its essence is legality and its justification should be at the helm of its success in curbing the Ebola crisis, strengthening the delivery of healthcare to the far to reach and most vulnerable communities, restore hopes and foster sustainable development .

For example, European confidence in its ‘civilising mission’ was severely tested by the experience of dictatorship, beginning with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. The UN Charter was therefore drawn up in the context of extreme skepticism about ‘humanitarian’ justifications for intervention purposes. Critics of military humanitarian intervention argue that it is no accident that the doctrine of humanitarian intervention in customary law was so abused that it had become worthless. Advocates argue that the UN Charter is designed to restrict the use of force to self-defense and collective action in support of peace and human rights. Over the last 40 years, a number of governments have justified unilateral military action with reference to the customary law of military humanitarian intervention in one form or another. Without exception, the international community has refused to recognize these actions as legitimate. Clear instances are Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia and Tanzania’s invasions of Uganda, both in 1979. In all these cases, the absence of UN sanction of the military action has been of paramount importance in the wider refusal to condone the actions as true cases of humanitarian intervention.In a globalized world, military humanitarian intervention might have recently undergone a revival in circumstances where national sovereignty has manifestly failed to serve the citizens of a given state. If an abusive government such as the one in Iraq or Sudan cites ‘sovereignty’ to defend actions involving mass violations of human rights, then it is clearly failing to exercise that power on behalf of the people to whom it is supposed to be accountable. The democratic endorsement can only be seen as the outcome of a genuine international collective will of the community of nations’ consensus on Universal Declaration of Human Rights and IHR (2005), where the benefits outweigh the consequences. This should not be the outcome of manipulation by one or more powerful countries with foreign policy concerns.

Management interventions

Management should involve system enhancement and implement through joint efforts guided by evidence-based information both from the community and frontline humanitarian organizations. Timely and fit-for-purpose responses should be instituted in promoting trust, cooperation and prompt recovery through accessible and 24 hour functioning Ebola healthcare centers and delivery of other public healthcare services nationwide. The need to encourage sustainable mobile health or web-based health application surveillance and early warning alert systems towards rapid information and communication management and tracing is also important. Public and private sector partnerships in emergency management and recovery services of non-conventional interventions require further careful research in filling knowledge gaps and issues. However, most people are aware of the active role any non-profit organizations take in disaster relief; for-profit contractors or organizations may not be as obvious but often play just as important a role. However, with the outlay of government support also comes a variety of opinionswhich dictate where and how the resources should be spent. Innovative partnerships should be effective, aimed at improving and alleviating the burden, and preventing death from the outbreak in the field by utilizing new methods and state-of-the-art approaches of active mitigation, collection responsibility in preparation, response, and recovery under the provincial, national and regional emergency response framework.