E.B. White, remembered more today for Charlotte's Web than his moral philosophy, famously addressed this concept by saying, "When a man hangs from a tree it doesn't spell justice unless he helped write the law that hanged him." This is not meant to be an apology or explanation for the consistent violation of these "rights," however; Robert Jackson, Chief Prosecutor for the United States at the Nuremberg Trials for Nazi war criminals after World War II, claimed general consensus of every civilizations published laws against murder as justification for charging high-ranking Nazi's with international crimes. Though the world failed to act on -- in fact, willfully ignored -- the first hints of the Holocaust and Hitler's Final Solution, it intervened via an internationally sanctioned judicial process after the fact, punishing many of the men responsible for the atrocities of the death camps. Still further debate was carried out in the establishment of the Untied Nations, which has adopted a Human Rights charter and established a permanent international court, the Hague, to deal with large-scale human rights violators. Though it is still naive to think of these rights as naturally granted and indisputable, if the concept of human rights and intervention to prevent and end encroachments upon them is to carry any real meaning or weight, it must come from as broad and complete a consensus of the international community as possible.
Unfortunately, achieving...
For this reason, some argue that it is the duty of the strong to protect the weak. This rationale has been used by dominant powers for centuries both for good and ill; it was a major rationalization for the American occupation of the Philippines and the establishment of British colonies throughout the world, actions which are now generally condemned by history; it was also the reason behind the U.S. And NATO involvement in the Balkan nations during the various genocides that occurred there during the 1990s. The question becomes one of duty to the oppressed vs. duty to the global community. Often, these two duties coincide, and it is for this reason that, despite the extra time and effort, it is the global community that must collectively -- or at least multilaterally -- decide when intervention is necessary, and the form and extent of that intervention. It is too easy for a single entity, be it an established nation or a tribal warlord, to act according to their own beliefs and so trample the beliefs of others. Though global discussion does not, and cannot, provide a logical proof for the consensus such discussions lead to, it is the safest assurance against tyranny by a single power. The danger still exists, as Mill posits in on Liberty, that a tyranny of the majority is still possible, but in the grey areas of human rights, this is by far the lesser of two evils.
