National Sovereignty must be valued over Human Rights by the UN

The United Nations is a real world institution that must be protected so it can do as much good as allowed for in the world.

Creating specific human rights treaties are very individualistic and marginalize the importance of communities. Xiaorong (“Zaw-Rong”) Li explains:
“Human rights emerge in the context of particular social, economic, cultural and political conditions. The circumstances that prompted the institutionalization of human rights in the West do not exist in Asia… The importance of the community in Asian culture is incompatible with the primacy of the individual upon which the Western notion of human rights rests…. Human rights and the rule of law, according to the “Asian view,” are individualistic by nature and hence destructive of Asia’s social mechanisms.”
The UN Declaration of human rights outlines a very Euro-centric set of rights that are incompatible with much of the world’s beliefs. Protecting these rights would give the UN license to disregard the cultural preferences of billions of people—seriously undermining the UN's credibility. If the UN loses its credibility in Asia, not only would major countries like China potentially pull out of the UN, but after that, even if it wanted to work in a cultural compatible way with the East, it would not be able to, leaving potential atrocities to be un-interfered with. This does not mean that the UN should not act in extreme circumstances in Asia, because it values both its obligations, but it should respect Asia's countries culture and heritage by respecting their sovereignty and not imposing their Western set of human rights upon a centralized and community oriented culture.

Human rights law is very expansive and would provide the UN a blank check to overrule sovereignty for almost any reason. No nation would agree to let the UN maintain this new power. UN members that by comparison to other members most severely violate human rights would have to pull out of the UN because if they were no longer UN members, the UN would have no legal jurisdiction. Thus in an that world, the worst human-rights abusers wouldn’t be UN members which is comparatively worse because there would be absolutely no check on human rights abuses.

The impact to all of these arguments is that the UN losing its credibility will cause it to not be able to protect rights adequately over the world, especially in the East, and eventually globally as nations reject its supreme power. We must not value the UN's proposed set of global human rights over sovereignty on par because it would destroy the UN itself, stopping all its current positive influence on the world.

Violating Sovereignty and Imposing Human Rights has Disasterous Consequences.



Sub point A: Delegitimizing a National Government leads to Terrorism and Totalitarianism.

Social order rests on one keystone: the recognized authority of a government to enforce the law and protect rights.
Taking the responsibility of protecting rights away from a government means that individuals are left uncertain about who and what is in control of their society. This leads to a situation where groups compete to fill the power vacuum, often terrorizing the population and causing internal chaos. This fear is dangerous because as Erich Fromm writes: quote

If the economic, social, and political conditions on which the whole process of
human individuation13 depends, do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality
. . . [and] people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag
makes freedom an unbearable burden. It then becomes identical with doubt, with a
kind of life that lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape
from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and
the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual
of his freedom.14


Protecting UN human rights leads to worse human rights

Jeremy Moses writes:

Humanitarian intervention, by extension, may be seen as the militaristic wing of post-Cold War liberal globalisation, forcing – if peaceful conversion fails - errant nations to be ‘free’. “The argument made by those in favour of humanitarian intervention,” according to Anne Orford, “is that the use of force is necessary to address the problems of racist and ruthless dictators, tribalism, ethnic tension, civil war and religious fundamentalism thrown up in the post-Cold War era.”33 Those states or political leaders that engage in such behaviour are given the now familiar labels of ‘rogue states’, ‘failed states’, or ‘tyrants’ against whom action must be taken in order to preserve the new ‘global order’. “The failure to take such action”, Orford continues, “amounts to ‘abstention from the foreign policy debate’, and any challenge to interventionism ‘rewards tyrants’ and ‘betrays the very purposes of the international order.’”34 Humanitarian intervention, therefore, becomes the disciplinary arm of a liberal world order, enforcing adherence to the virtuous morality of the international community, and bringing freedom to all the individuals of
.0the world.

There are a number of dangers within such logic. First, as I outlined above, humanitarianism is said to negate sovereignty through the protection of individual rights, yet one cannot intervene solely against the perpetrators of human rights abuses, and the entire sovereign state becomes the target for punishment. Through this confused logic, the domestic analogy appears as incomplete, as does the image of a totality of global citizens, all under the protection of human rights. As a result, those whose rights are ostensibly being protected as global citizens may also find themselves under attack as members of the rogue state. An example that illustrates this claim is Kosovo.
Secondly, the freedom that is being brought by the intervening parties is, as it was for Rousseau, limited to those who support and enact the principles of liberal virtue, namely human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. Or, more bluntly, “The people living in states subjected to intervention are only free to choose to be (almost) the same as those ‘saving’ them.”35 The sheer impossibility of such an aspiration will become evident through the historical and contemporary examples I outline below.
Finally, and most importantly, the ‘universal truth’ claim of today’s humanitarians has the potential to be an endlessly repetitive violent project, “constantly seeking new objects of ‘liberation’.”36 Hugo Slim has recognised this ‘moral paradox’, whereby violence becomes an acceptable means for enforcing universal standards of civilisation, arguing that “The humanitarian project in law and practice is one, therefore, which at
once legitimates and mitigates violence. Indeed, it legitimates it by mitigating it.”37 Anne Orford makes a similar point, further arguing that:
The horror of such narratives is that they can be, indeed must be, retold over and over, with the promised redemption involving ‘an ever greater subordination to already existing scenarios’. The creation or production of the self of the international community becomes an endlessly repetitive project.38
What must be recognised here is the ongoing danger of belief in the universalisable truth of liberal philosophy, as the imposition of such ideals upon a broad and infinitely varied population always requires the construction of good and evil identities, and the subsequent attempt to eradicate or assimilate (through force or rhetoric) that which is considered evil or incompatible with the dominant discourse. Most importantly, it can be shown that liberalism, or any other form of mass political ideology, is entirely reliant on having these enemies in order to continually justify its own project, meaning that the violence I have examined so far, be it on behalf of God, liberty, or some combination of the two, can never end. In this way, liberalism is perhaps more dangerous than even the most overtly violent political discourses, in that it must be constantly self-effacing. For it cannot be acknowledged that ‘freedom’ comes with a very strong and decisive set of conditions, that individuality must reside within conformity, that a specific conception of virtuous morality lies at the heart of what can and cannot be tolerated.


Moses is making three arguments: First, that valuing obligations to global human rights requires using a 'blunt instrument' like humanitarian intervention or sanctions that end up violating the rights of innocents. Second, Moses argues that it is only one particular vision of human rights that will be expressed in intervention; why is 'liberating' individuals not just actually 're-culturing' individuals to conform to western ideals of freedom. Finally, the most important argument is that a cycle of violence is inevitiable if we are allowed to justify violence according to human rights because human rights are premised on constructing good and evil identities. This unending cycle of violence is caused by accepting the liberal democratic view of human rights as universal.