• Katharina Mader

• Friederike Wütscher

13.10.2003 Professor Dr. jur. Reinhard Merkel (Universität Hamburg)

Since the end of  World War II, observers have recorded approximately 200 wars throughout the world. The hope that wars could be a thing of the past due to the experience of two world wars has not come true. Instead, the traditional topos of the “just war” is being revived. While self-defence against exterior aggression used to be considered a legitimate reason to go to war, military intervention for the sake of a third party, a so-called “humanitarian intervention”, has, since the war in Kosovo, been established as another justification for war.
Professor Reinhard Merkel took the war in Kosovo as an example to discuss the justification of military intervention in foreign countries as a means to enforce basic human rights.
Merkel distinguished between two fundamental aspects: One is the question of legitimacy, the “if” of the justification of warfare, and the other is the question of the “how” of such an intervention. To use classical diction, it is the question of the “right to go to war” and the “rights during war”. In the end, humanitarian interventions in a well-understood meaning of the term means exercising rights in a state of emergency under international law. Thus, they can be, albeit under very restrictive criteria, permissible without any authorisation from the UN Security Council. The concrete mode of the Kosovo intervention was, however, in view of its, at best legitimising purpose, ethically objectionable as a matter of principle, because the initiators imposed the burden of it not on themselves, but on others (the innocent and uninvolved).
Professor Dr. jur. Reinhard Merkel studied Law, Philosophy, and Literature at Bochum, Heidelberg, and Munich. He was editor at the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit” (Arts Section) from 1988 to 1990 and received the Jean-Amery-Prize as a remarkable essayist in 1991. He is currently professor of penal law and legal philosophy at the University of Hamburg.
His main research interests are dogmatics of penal law, fundamental research in legal philosophy, ethics of law, law and ethics in medicine, political philosophy, and international penal law.