"Human rights or national sovereignty?"

Here is an interesting article on the U.N.'s inner battle of what is more important, defending basic human rights or letting Governments have sovereignty over their own decisions in this matter.

As the author puts it:

a nation's right to non-meddling in its internal affairs by other countries, its sovereignty, versus the international community's responsibility to ensure human rights for all

It's obvious from the article that the author and most at the U.N. did not approve of the intervention in Iraq:

snarked the Russian permanent representative Vitaly Churkin in a security council meeting on Georgia. "And I would like to ask the distinguished representative of the United States: weapons of mass destruction – have you found them yet in Iraq or are you still looking for them?"

No, we haven't found them, but we did find mass graves of women and children killed by them. Guess that doesn't matter much to them. I'm thinking that if a dictator gassing, shooting, and torturing innocent people doesn't count as a "human rights" violation, I don't know what does.

But now that evil warmonger, George Bush is gone, I suppose the U.N. (who were very happy about Obama's win) can rest easy that the U.S. will not intervene again in a country's sovereignty.

Actually, not really.

The new US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, is on record saying she'd rather "go down in flames" than fail to do something about Darfur, so it seems clear that the Americans are still interventionists. So in the end, the question turns out to be whether Rice can convince the rest of the world that after Iraq, there is a difference between a neocon interventionist and a humanitarian one.

Yeah. Right. What's the difference exactly? Stopping the brutal killing of innocent people seems to be the same in Darfur as it was in Iraq. But the complaint has always been that we went into Iraq, a Muslim country, for it's oil. Ending the brutal dictatorship was just secondary. Yeah. Hmmmm..... Guess what? Going into Darfur would be the same thing. It's Muslim and Sudan has lots of the good black stuff too.

Doesn't look like the "change" the U.N. was hoping for, will come to pass.