Only when there is clear evidence or a strong supposition of wrongdoing will the right to privacy be challenged. Moreover, it will typically only be breached by first gaining the consent of the occupants of the property and if this is not forthcoming by seeking proper authorization or a "warrant" from a designated judicial authority that can determine whether such actions are appropriate and therefore justified.
Finding the appropriate balance so that the rights of individuals and the interests of the community are protected is neither a straightforward nor a static process. As a practical matter, it is difficult to construct cast iron criteria or "rules for enforcing the rules" that satisfy both desiderata. Most societies as a consequence find that the balance they strike has to be constantly reviewed (usually by impartial bodies) and adjusted to adapt to changing circumstances and public pressures.
Extending the domestic analogy to the global level suggests the following: State sovereignty should also be considered preeminent but not unconditional. In the first instance, the right to sovereign independence must derive from the state's capacity to discharge its core responsibility to provide for the welfare of its citizens. This "sovereignty as responsibility" argument has been made most forcefully by Francis Deng et al:
"The state has the right to conduct its activities undisturbed from the outside when it acts as the original agent to meet the needs of its citizens. But that right is not license. It is merely―and normally―the obligation of the first resort, and it is dependent on the performance of the agent. If the obligation is not performed, the right to inviolability should be regarded as lost, first voluntarily as the state itself asks for help from its peers, and then involuntarily as it has help imposed on it in response to its own inactivity or incapacity and to the unassuaged needs of its own people."35
The right of external intervention is arguably even stronger―again following on from the analogy with private property―if the actions of the state are deliberately harmful to the welfare of its citizens rather than being the result of negligence or misfortune and, moreover, if such actions carry the strong likelihood of being detrimental to the sovereignty and interests of other states. This is essentially the argument underlying most UN sponsored humanitarian interventions in recent years. It is one that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has most forcefully articulated.36
Continuing with the same analogy, a nation's sovereign rights should only be challenged reluctantly and, furthermore, breached according to rules that are generally acceptable to the international community and consequently confer legitimacy to the practice. Compared to the circumstances that would normally justify intervention in an individual's private affairs, defining acceptable rules for international inter-vention―certainly for humanitarian purposes―are clearly much harder to do. Whereas the credible indication that the life of a single person is endangered would normally be sufficient to trigger police intervention, the threshold obviously has to be much higher to justify infringing a state's sovereignty. The criterion of "massive and systemic suffering" is commonly cited but there is no clear definition of what this means in practice. Should it be measured in absolute terms―tens or hundreds of thousands of fatalities for example―or in relative terms according to the size of the population.37 And should a time dimension be added too so that the frequency of killing in a given period is also part of the criterion.
