ABSTRACT
T he application of international human rights and humanitarian norms varies according to the part of the UN system we are talking about. At the first UN, through their governmental authorities, states make the key decisions. Almost always, state policy on human rights and humanitarian affairs is filtered through the prism of national interest. States rarely criticize or condemn their friends and allies publicly. They rarely pursue decisive policies to protect the rights of foreigners especially if costly in terms of blood and treasure. States almost always consider to some extent their “sovereignty costs”—namely, the extent to which international human rights and humanitarian norms constrain national independence and tradition. At the first UN, concerns about human rights and humanitarian affairs are thus almost always politicized in the sense of being affected by concerns about national self-interest (subjectively defined, of course). For example, in 2015 Russia vetoed a Security Council resolution calling attention to the massacre of Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995 by its ally Serbia; the United States repeatedly has vetoed various council resolutions critical of the treatment of Palestinians by Israel, which has a special relationship to many Americans; China often has vetoed Security Council resolutions pertaining to its neighbor North Korea, as Beijing fears a mass migration from instability there; and in the Human Rights Council in 2015 the United States did not support an effort to investigate alleged Saudi war crimes in the fighting in Yemen because that might prove embarrassing to one of its main allies in the Middle East. Such developments provoked the French human rights activist Bernard Kouchner, founder of Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans Frontières) and former foreign minister of France, to lament that even democratic states, such as France, could not 186formulate a consistent human rights policy because of the requirement to defend national interests. 1
