Unit 5D: Governing the USA Andrew Williams Professor at the Department of Politics and International Relations writes for BBC Parliament

The United Nations represents the international community

From the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 until the end of the Cold War there was a semi-formal commitment by most of the international community to the idea of human rights.

But in practice there was a difficult debate between those states that felt that either civil and political rights should take priority and those who believed in the centrality of economic and social rights.

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Broadly speaking all states believed the main guarantee of any rights was through state sovereignty and the norm of non-intervention.

Since the end of the Cold War there has been a growing tendency for civil and political rights to be stressed over economic and social rights.

There has also been a corresponding decline in the belief in the overriding importance of state sovereignty where the rights of the individual person were being abused, as in the many conflicts under way around the globe.

This has had two important knock-on effects, the first stressing the need for an ethical (human rights based) foreign policy and the second the need for liberal democratic states to defend the rights of those in states not so fortunate.

Legitimizing the use of power

The term most used in the implementation of foreign policy by liberal states and by the international community is "humanitarian intervention".

The essence of this is that under certain circumstances it is legitimate for the international community to intervene in the internal affairs of sovereign states.

A key question posed is to what extent humanitarian intervention should be allowed as an exception to the rule of sovereignty and non-intervention.

Then there are motives and practicalities, as witnessed in the Middle East (Iraq) Africa (Somalia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone for example), and in the Former Yugoslavia (Bosnia, Kosovo).

Different responses

There are hard and soft versions of the doctrine, the one usually called 'solidarism' that urges a cosmopolitan response to an objectively horrible situation.

Conservative or realist thinkers see humanitarian intervention as usually wrong and misguided as it damages the basic sovereignty norm of the international system.

Some have argued that the Charter of the United Nations is a clear statement that force should not be used unless a state poses a threat to international peace and security, yet since 1990 force has often been used by the United Nations to defend human rights.

This has meant that the Article 2(4) that underpins this "norm of non-intervention" has had had to be modified in practice so that certain regimes are seen as "illegitimate" so they lose the right of sovereignty and protection against the use of force.

There is now in effect a balance that has to be struck between the needs of international security and those of justice.

In some instances (like Former Yugoslavia) the need to defend human rights is generally accepted to have been effective and justifiable.

Many would argue that in the case of Iraq and Somalia the justification is not so evident.