More on the justification of enforcing the no-fly zones, this time from a 26 June 2000 report prepared for the British House of Commons.

Our colleagues on the Foreign Affairs Committee recently examined the ‘doctrine’ of humanitarian necessity in their Report on Kosovo. They concluded —

… at the very least, the doctrine of humanitarian intervention has a tenuous basis in current international customary law…

Specifically in relation to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, that Committee decided that the action was ‘of dubious legality in the current state of international law’ but ‘justified on moral grounds’.[76] The Foreign Affairs Committee supports the ‘aim of establishing in the United Nations new principles governing humanitarian intervention’.[77] We too would support that aim but in the meantime, in the absence of internationally agreed procedures, we have no doubt that UK participation in the no-fly zone operations over Iraq is justified on moral and humanitarian grounds.