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Resolved: The United Nations' obligation to protect global human rights ought to be valued above its obligation to respect national sovereignty

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 NFL LD Topic
 Date Used  March/April 2007

Most Lincoln-Douglas debate topics ask the debaters to weigh two competing values. At first glance, this topic which is National Forensic League's Lincoln-Douglas Debate topic for for March and April 2007, might appear to be just such a topic, but it is not.

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Overview

What makes this a rather challenging topic, particularly for the affirmative, is that the conflict here is not as obvious as it may appear and the burdens more complex than they may at first appear.

Consider the following alternative ways in which this topic might have been worded:

  1. Human rights ought to be valued above national sovereignty.
  2. The nations of the world ought to value human rights above national sovereignty.
  3. The United Nations ought to value human rights above national sovereignty.

Any of these topics would have been easier to debate than this NFL topic and each should probably considered by debaters preparing to debate the NFL topic. For instance, if the affirmative can prove that human rights ought to be universally valued over national sovereignty, then it would be a lot easier to prove that the UN ought to do so. Unfortunately, even if the affirmative can only prove that, in general, human rights ought ought to be valued above national sovereignty, that wouldn't necessarily mean that the UN ought to do so. A negative could, and perhaps even should, concede that human rights are indeed more valuable to national sovereignty, but that the United Nations, given its unique role in international relations, ought to value its obligation to respect national sovereignty above its obligation to protect human rights. Negative might even be able to argue that the best way for the United Nations to protect human rights might be by it respecting national sovereignty. Unfortunaely for the negative, the way the topic is worded, it's not entirely clear that a negative case which proved that respecting national sovereignty would be the best way for the United Nations to protect human rights actually prove the resolution false. This is because the topic does not specify who it is that ought to value these two competing United Nations obligations. There would be nothing logically inconsistent were an agent to value the United Nations' oblgiation to respect national sovereignty over its obligation to protect human rights even as the same agent valued human rights over national sovereignty.

The lack of an obvious agent of action in this topic adds complications for the debaters. An easier topic to debate would be "The United Nations ought to value its obligation to protect global human rights above its obligation to respect national sovereignty." In this case, we would have known who the agent of action was in the topic. Since the topic employs the passive voice, it is unclear who it is that would be valuing the obligation to protect global human rights above As worded, however, the topic doesn't tell us who ought to value these competing United Nation's obligations. Should the topic be read as if it its the United Nations that ought to decide which of its two obligation it ought to prioritize? If so, then why wasn't the topic worded that way? Should the United States decide for itself which of its obligations to value above one another? Is it the United Nation's members states that ought to weigh the value of these to United Nation's obligations? These are likely to become important issues that will need to be resolved in the round.

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Definitions

Though the lack of an [agent of action] makes this a rather complex topic to debate, the phrase that make it up are relatively clear and offering definitions should not prove too difficult.

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The United Nations

Image:200px-Flag of the United Nations.svg.png

The United Nations is an organization that officially came into existence on October 24, 1945, when the United Nations Charter was ratified by China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States and a majority of the 51 first member States. There are currently 192 members states. To quote the the United Nations' website:

When States become Members of the United Nations, they agree to accept the obligations of the UN Charter, an international treaty that sets out basic principles of international relations. According to the Charter, the UN has four purposes: to maintain international peace and security; to develop friendly relations among nations; to cooperate in solving international problems and in promoting respect for human rights; and to be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations.

The United Nations is not a world government and it does not make laws. It does, however, provide the means to help resolve international conflicts and formulate policies on matters affecting all of us. At the UN, all the Member States — large and small, rich and poor, with differing political views and social systems — have a voice and a vote in this process.

The United Nations has six main organs. Five of them — the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the Trusteeship Council and the Secretariat — are based at UN Headquarters in New York. The sixth, the International Court of Justice, is located at The Hague in the Netherlands.
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"Global Human Rights"

The United Nations' obligation to protect human rights is outlined in a series of documents. The most well known and important of the them is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. One wonders why the NFL topic committee chose the adjective "global" as opposed to "universal" in wording this topic and whether the "global" was inclued in the topic simply to contrast with the "national." Even if "global" was inserted for only stylistic reasons, it does has a substanative impact on the debate since it suggests that the set of rights that the United Nations is obligation to protect is not necessarily the same as the set defined in the UNDHR or other United Nation's covenants. This could prove beneficial to the affirmative since this would allow the affirmative to define a limited set of human rights that could be said to act as trumps on national sovereignty.

A problem, however, that the insertion of the word "global" presents to the affirmative is that it does seem to open the door to negative's wishing to critique the notion that there are any human rights that could truly be said to be global. The UNDHR clearly defines a set of rights that the UN is obligated to protect, but negative could argue that these rights exist by convention and that there are no analogous set of "global" rights. A negative who argued along these lines would be sure to elicit groans from traditionalist judges, the more postmodernly inclined national circuit judges might accept a negative like this. It is a negative strategy that affirmatives will need to be prepared to refute.

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"National Sovereignty"

There is an ongoing debate taking place in the academic community on whether the "national sovereignty" is an anachronism; a monument to an age before globalization. To paraphrase Samuel Clemens, however, the death of the nation state has been greatly exaggerated. Nonetheless, one thing worth questioning today is what is the moral foundation of national sovereignty. That is, though the United Nations is undeniably bound by the charter that established it to respect national sovereignty, it is not entirely clear why sovereignty ought to be respected.

An interest question for debate is what respect for national sovereignty requires. For instance, Iran has claimed that the extraordinarily mild sanctions that the United Nations has imposed on it on account of its failure to suspend its uranium enrichment program constitutes an infringement on its sovereignty. Does it? What about stronger economic sanctions? What about even weaker measures like, for instance, resolutions condemning the actions of a state but that impose no penalty on that state for those actions?

While most debates on this topic will rightfully focus on questions of humanitarian intervention, neither side should gloss over too easily the question of what respect for national sovereignty might entail.

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"Ought to be valued above"

Since this topic does not specify who it is that's doing the "valuing," it is hard to tell what the real world implications would be for affirming or negating this topic. Without knowing what the consequences of affirming or negating this topic makes it difficult to test its validity. Would affirming the topic mean authorizing the United Nations to intervene in cases where currently it does not? Or would we just be reaffirming the status quo.

It is worth keeping in mind, as well, that it's open to debate what it might mean in practice to value one obligation over another. While there are Lincoln Douglas debaters who try to insist that the practical applications of valuing one of these obligations or another is irrelevant since Lincoln-Douglas debate is a "values" debate, this is simply nonsense. Absent a real world context, there would really be little reason to even bother comparing the relative values of these obligations. This is particularly true given that the topic speaks of a specific real word institution in the United Nations.

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Affirming the Topic

Constructing an affirmative case for this topic is challenging given the topic's numerous ambiguities and its lack of a specific agent of action. That said, the affirmative should still avoid the temptation of spending too much time presenting observations, definitions, and other material before launching into a presentation of arguments. The affirmative should estblish a fair and reasonable interpretation of the topic and just defend it. What will be most important, however, is being prepared for the variety of different ways that the negative can attack the topic.

The affirmative would be ill advised to spend too much time trying to warrant a claim that human rights ought to be valued above national sovereignty. I don't believe that there will be many judges who will easily be persuaded that sovereignty, taken in the abstract, is more important than protecting human rights. Indeed, one could even claim that the question this topic is asking is whether the goal of protecting people's human rights is better served by entrusting their protection to the United Nations or by requiring the United Nations to respect sovereignty and to leave it to other actors to protect human rights in those cases where it might be necessasry to restrict national sovereignty to do so.

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Negating the Topic

[Jeremy Bentham] famously quipped that "The idea of rights is nonsense and the idea of natural rights is nonsense on stilts," but this would be poor footing on which to try to negate this topic. Though there are a good number of social and political theorists who have questioned the idea that there are universal rights, often claiming that they are just a western construct used as an ideological smokescreen behind which the West has acted to perpetuate colonial rule in a post-colonial world, and probably some national circuit judges who would buy this line of argument, it is ultimately self defeating. The reason is that's hard to argue that there's something wrong with imperialism or colonialism without reference to some notion of universal right.

Once negative accepts that there are universal human rights, however, it becomes hard to argue why their protection should not be valued above national sovereignty. This is particularly true if the value of national sovereignty is weighed in terms of its effectiveness in protecting human rights. Fortunately, this is where the wording of the topic does come to the rescue. The topic does not put the burden on the negative of proving that national sovereignty ought to be valued above human rights but, rather, whether United Nation's obligation to respect national sovereignty ought to valued above its obligation to protect human rights. If negative concedes the priority of human rights over national sovereignty then the debate can focus on the United Nation's competing obligations.

Negatives would be well advised to focus on what the practical implications of affirming the topic. First, it's worth noting that the United Nations currently has very little ability to act enforce the various human rights treaties that bind its members. What the United Nations most obviously lacks is a standing army capable of enforcing human rights norms. The United Nations currently relies on "peacekeeping" troops members states supply on a voluntary basis. The history of United Nations peacekeeping missions is decidedly mixed. The lack of a standing army under United Nations control clearly inhibits the United Nation's ability to act against sovereign states. In pointing this out, the negative should try to discern whether affirmative would support the United Nations raising a standing army.

The United Nations, as noted above, is not a governmental body. Negative can exploit this in two ways:

  1. Arguing that sovereign states are better able to protect global human rights than an international organization that has no independent means to protect human rights;
  2. Arguing that the powers that would need to be granted to the United Nations in order to enable it to effectively protect human rights would effectively make the United Nations into a highly undemocratic world government.

There are currently 192 United Nations member States. While in practice the richest, most powerful and populous member states have far more influence on United Nations' policy than poor, weak and small states, the small states still have more power within the United Nations structure than they might outside of that structure. Consider that in the General Assembly, China and Lichtenstein both get a single vote. This would be analogous, in the United States, to having a Senate and no House of Representatives.

The United Nations' lack of democratic legitimacy, the negative can argue, makes it a poor candidate to be the world's primary human rights protector. Admittedly, affirming the topic would not preclude individual states from acting to protect human rights, but the negative can rightly suggest that affirming the topic could have two negative consequences:

  1. Giving the United Nations more power than it ought to have
  2. Giving the impression that it would be the United Nations and not the members States who need to protect human rights.

Already, it has been proposed that no state ought to act to protect human rights at the expense of another nation's sovereignty without the approval of the United Nations. Some even believe already that an action taken by one country against another that not sanctioned by the United Nations is somehow illegitimate.

On the other hand, while the United Nations is undemocratic in the sense that it violates the principle of one person one vote in favor of one nation on vote, it is also undemocratic in that it does privilege some states over others, most notoriously in the Security Council where five nations are given an absolute veto. As a result the United Nations is often charged with being too beholden to its most powerful member states resulting in it alternatively acting only in these nations' interest. Thus, the United Nations does nothing to protect the human rights of people abused by powerful member States and too often interferes in the internal affairs of weak members states when it suits the interests of its more powerful states.

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Further Reading

A fine guide to the United Nations can be found in Linda Fasulo's Insider's Guide to the U.N.. It's a very easy read and there are a lot of places where she discusses either directly or indirectly this topic. She also quotes a lot of people whom she interviewed in putting this book together that have some interesting thoughts on issues relating to this topic. Interesting is that this book is somewhat out of date, particularly in its over the top praise of then United Nations General Secretary Kofi Annan. At the same time, the chapter on him in this book is quite instructive since it describes him as being the first Sectretary General to come down squarely on the side of the affirmative in this topic.

A very useful set of essays for this topic is Oxford Amnesty Lectures from 2001. Of particular interest in this book is Tzetan Todorov contribution to this volume; it could be the basis for a very strong negative case. Michael Ignatieff's essay is also top notch.

Another really good collection of essays is Human Rights in Global Politics. This book is very up to date.

For the traditional liberal discussion of this topic, see John Rawls influential The Law of Peoples. This book deals both with the question of humanitarian intervention and issues of international distributive justice. A good set of responses to Rawls can be found in Rawls's Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia?

Other good books on this subject that address it from a traditional liberal perspectinve include:

A good introduction to international human rights treaties, particularly the UN, is in a neat series, International Human Rights in a Nutshell.

Jeremy Rabkin offers a very strong, though polemical at points, argument in his new book [World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms Laws Without Nations?. If you can't read the whole book, read chapters one and seven. Rankin goes so far as to argue that the United Nations has no obligation to protect human rights, but I think he's on weak ground there. At the same time, he does make a good case for viewing the obligation to respect sovereignty as far more compelling than an obligation on the part of the United Nations to protect human rights. His argument against world government are particularly worth going over.

There's a very good collection of essays on human rights at this web site.

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External links

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