Human Rights, Humanitarian Intervention, and World Politics

Author(s): Kelly Kate Pease and David P. Forsythe

Source: Human Rights Quarterly, May, 1993, Vol. 15, No. 2 (May, 1993), pp. 290-314

Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/762540

International law, and the world politics that creates and sustains it, has increasingly manifested a tension between the primacy of state sovereignty and other values that would challenge that primacy.’ One of those challenging values is individual human rights. A persistent question is receiving renewed attention at the end of the twentieth century: is the international community entitled to override state sovereignty in the interest of protecting persons?United Nations action concerning Iraqi Kurds during 1991-1992 is but one manifestation of this renewed tension between state sovereignty and human rights.