Military Interventions against ISIL in Iraq, Syria and Libya, and the Legal Basis of Consent

INTERNATIONAL LAW AND PRACTICE: Symposium on the Fight against ISIL and International Law

*. Associate Professor of International Law, Centre for International Security and European Studies (CESICE), University Grenoble-Alpes [

[email protected]

].

1.

Introduction

The recent history of military interventions is full of invocations of the argument of invitation or consent as a legal basis for external intervention. During recent years, invitation or consent of different kinds and forms have been invoked, validly or not, in order to justify the intervention of France in Mali, the US drone strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Russia's intervention in Ukraine, the Saudi's coalition intervention in Yemen, and, of course, the strikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)¹in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Intervention on the basis of consent thus becomes a common legal argument to justify military intervention - almost as common as self-defence. The use of this argument raises important problems, and not only in relation to the legitimacy of the inviting government or the validity of consent.

This article will focus on the multiple external interventions in Iraq, Libya, and Syria. The objective will be twofold. On the one hand, I will assess if consent is a valid and sufficient legal basis for the multiple interventions undertaken by different countries on the territory of these states since August 2014. On the other hand, I will examine what is the influence of these cases in relation to the evolution of some legal principles such as volenti non fit injuria or the principle of non-intervention in civil war and internal strife. Before undertaking this research, it is necessary to note some methodological difficulties linked to the complexity of the conflicts (Section 1.1) and to recall the legal framework of intervention by invitation against which the present analysis will be conducted (Section 1.2).

1.1. Methodological difficulties linked to the complexity of the conflicts

The task of this article is far from easy for at least three reasons. Firstly, as more and more jihadi groups in different countries aligned themselves with, or pledged allegiance to ISIL,²the global fight against the terrorist group expanded, raising issues of consent in other cases of intervention, such as in Afghanistan.³Without neglecting the phenomenon of intervention...