But he does not make any suggestions about how this compromise might be done. Krasner's conclusion, put in real life, would inevitably lead to more intervention in various forms. Following him, State, UN, OSCE, IRC and other institutions would be just another of different entities, none of which has the right to claim ultimate authority.
So it is that sovereignty is not a divine rule in international relations. It has been compromised repeatedly in the past and has been this time also in the case of Kosovo. Most observers seem to think what was violated was sovereignty or the principle of non-intervention on 24th of March 1998. But my impression was that what caused concern was not that NATO bombarded Yugoslavia, but the fact that this was done without UN Security Council resolution. Most debates circled around whether this was possible because of some emerging human rights norm, or this was not right because UN did not allow use of force in such cases.
For our interest here will be the principle of human fights, or "human rights regime," as current political scientists prefer to use, and the authority of the United Nations, especially the Security Council, as an actor in this regime.
3. Institutionalization of human rights after WWII
Most studies agree that human rights concern in international politics is a relatively new phenomenon. Fundamental right of a human being can be traced back several centuries, but this only began to be institutionalized―as administrative agencies, laws, norms, or operating procedures―after the Second World War. The most representative of these are the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the two United Nations covenants adopted in 1966 (International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights). Another famous document is the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948. The body of international law has increased and with it its significance, that it is now very common to speak of "human rights regime."
International regimes are defined as "principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge in a given issue-area,"11 or "social institutions consisting of agreed upon principles, norms, rules, procedures and programs that govern the interactions of actors in specific issue areas."12
So when we speak of a "human rights regime," we often refer to what Kathryn Sikkink calls "multilateral human rights policy," which contains partial surrender of sovereignty to submit internal human rights practices to some international review. Sikkink differentiates this from external human rights policy. To be categorized as having an external human rights policy, a country either must have an explicit bilateral human rights policy through which human rights concerns are incorporated in foreign policy, or must have used multilateral channels regularly to file complaints or attempt to change the human rights practices of other states.
