Anti-Climacus

The Libya intervention was and is a strange bird, and for a lot of reasons:

1. It was a UN action to stop potential human rights violations largely before they started
2. It specifically invoked the Security Council's Chapter VII powers. For those who don't know, the Security Council is essentially allowed to authorize whatever military actions it likes for whatever reasons it finds sufficient.
3. The UN resolution threw open the doors to whoever wanted to be involved.
4. The resolution mentioned the still somewhat controversial Responsibility to Protect doctrine.

I would've bet a large pile of money against any of these outcomes before they happened. Though they did happen, I would bet a similarly large pile of money against their happening again: international law on these questions is filled with too many one-off events, perceived to be the start of something new, that were never repeated.

For these reasons, I'm not surprised that some African scholars are disputing the legal basis of the intervention. Unfortunately, though they dress up their concern in the language of #3, which does seem to me to be of dubious legality, their real problem is with #2. On that point, they're out of luck, because (to the best of my knowledge) everyone in the mainstream agrees that the Security Council gets to do whatever it wants, as that's the whole point of having a Security Council in the first place.