ABSTRACT
Although human rights are affirmed in the United Nations Charter in very general language, their operative reality was not specified, and their overall role in international political life was deemed marginal in the aftermath of World War II.! This marginality existed in 1945 in the face of the vivid disclosures of the Nazi era, as well as the surfacing of a vague aura of guilt hovering over Western liberal democracies. This guilt was associated with their prolonged forbearance in relation to Nazi Germany so long as Hitler's atrocious crimes were directed at his own citizenry. Despite this mood, the foundation of world order continued to rest very much on the territorial logic of territorial states, in conjunction with the supportive doctrine of sovereignty and the ideology of nationalism.2 A major implication of this logic was that the internal arrangements and policies of states were never properly subject to external accountability.3 The UN Charter confirmed this statist feature of world order in Article 2(7) by reassuring its members that it lacked the authority to intervene in matters that were "essentially within the domestic jurisdiction" of states. This prohibition was subject only to qualification relating to the overriding responsibility of the UN acting under Chapter VII of the Charter to maintain international peace and security.
