African Union Intervention in the 2015 Burundi’s Crisis: Aspiration Versus Reality
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Date
2018-01
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Currently, the African Union (AU) Constitutive Act is the only international treaty that
provides for a legally binding right of intervention against genocide, crimes against humanity,
and war crimes that are committed against inhabitants of a state, within its boundaries. The
AU’s right of intervention is not only a positive step towards protecting people against mass
atrocities from their own state it is also an innovative norm in international law.
This research is anchored on the December 2015 decision of the AU Peace and Security
Council (PSC), a precedent-setting invocation of the AU’s Article 4(h) authorizing the
deployment of a military mission to Burundi to quell violence related to the dispute over the
third term of the country’s President and the refuting January 2016 summit decision scrapping
the plan to deploy troops.
However, as shown in this research, there are major normative and institutional gaps that may
hamper the enforcement of the AU’s right of intervention. Among the most notable gaps are:
lack of precision on the types and criterion for military intervention; lack of credible
enforcement organs; lack of unity among members and lack of commitment to the principle of
non-indifference. Therefore, the AU needs to tackle these problems to be successful in future
interventions.Keywords: Intervention, Responsibility to protect, non-indifference, Burundi
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Keywords
Intervention, Responsibility to protect, non-indifference, Burundi