ABSTRACT
As evidenced by the preamble to the 1949 Washington Treaty, the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have long committed themselves to the defense of a common set of principles, namely, "democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law." NATO's increasingly political mission has also had important implications for its military dimension. NATO's interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo were both justified to some degree on human rights grounds, and, in the case of Kosovo, NATO went so far as to effectively declare that the human rights of the Kosovar Albanians took precedence over the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia's claim to sovereignty. In May 2002, the allies agreed to establish a new NATO-Russia Council, which allows Russia a seat at the table during NATO discussions of certain, specified issues, including terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
