Lawfully declared by lawful authority

Lawfully declared by lawful authority

Lawfully declared war

Only a war lawfully declared, by a government with the authority to declare war, can be a just war.

This rule enormously restricts the number of groups that can ethically wage war. For example, it stops wars declared by rebels who've overthrown a legal government being considered ethical.

It also prevents sneaky attacks in advance of a declaration of war being ethically acceptable as part of a Just War.

The example usually quoted of an attack before a declaration of war is the Japanese attack on the Americans at Pearl Harbour.

Pre-emptive strikes

There are circumstances where an advance declaration of war would be inappropriate. There is a fuller article on pre-emptive strikes within this section.

Lawful authority

This means the legal government of the state concerned. In some states - monarchies, dictatorships - this may be a single person, but it will usually be a government.

Most countries have established procedures for legally declaring a war, and these must be followed for a war to be a Just War.

There are two obvious problems with this, first: there can sometimes be doubt as to which group is the lawful government of a country, and second: if a government behaves in a way that is arbitrary and unjust does its 'lawful' authority have the necessary ethical force for it to be entitled to wage a Just War?

The UN as the lawful authority

From the middle years of the twentieth century people have often said that the appropriate authority should be the United Nations, rather than individual states.

While the UN doesn't declare war, there have been several recent cases of UN actions that can be regarded as 'lawful authorisation'.

There were UN resolutions to use force to expel Iraq from Kuwait; to preserve the no-fly zones in Bosnia; for the United States to act under Article 51 (the right of self defence) in Afghanistan and so on.

Some people have argued that because the UN is now the highest authority in the world, only a war authorised by the UN should count as a just war.

For example, they say that the US and the UK could not claim that an attack on Iraq was ethically acceptable as a just war if they had not obtained a specific UN resolution to authorise it.

Against the UN as the lawful authority

Other people disagree with this view, because there is no universal agreement as to how far sovereign states have surrendered to the UN their authority to wage war.

From a strictly legal point of view UN member states actually have given up their right to wage war, since they are bound by Article 2.4 of the Charter which says that "all members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force".

The idea of the UN as the final authority is very legalistic since in practice the actual power to do things such as wage war remains with individual states (or more usually alliances of states) rather than with the United Nations.