interveening in human rights abuses

I affirm resolved: The United States is justified in intervening in the internal political processes of other countries to attempt to stop human rights abuses. Justified means permissible. For example, I am justified in drinking a bottle of water after I run because I am thirsty, but it doesn"t mean I have an obligation to do so. Also, justified concerns the specifics of situations because different things are justified in different circumstances. For instance it"s justified for my dad to have a hammer in his toolbox even though hammers aren"t useful in all situations. The resolution isn"t a categorical statement that all political interference to stop human rights violations are good, but rather that it is permissible in certain circumstances like a tool in the toolbox. For the neg to win, my opponent must prove that the action of the resolution is not permissible at all. For the sake of clarification in this debate, I would like to define the following terms from An online Dictionary: Human Rights meaning inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being. And intervening meaning to Come between so as to prevent or alter a result or course of events. I value equality My value criterion is normative standard because it is the best tool with which to measure if my value is being upheld in this debate. Normative Standard is the idea that the ultimate goal of a value or action can be shown to be moral if it universally applies to all people in all situations. CONTENTION One Moral Responsibility to Protect Human Rights Luke Glanville says The "responsibility to protect" encompasses two broad propositions. The first proposition is that states have a responsibility to protect their own populations from mass atrocities The second proposition of the "responsibility to protect" concept is that bystander states or the "international community" have not simply a right but a collective responsibility to assist host states in protecting their populations and to act to protect these populations in situations where the host state is manifestly failing to do so. What is important here is the process by which Shue arrives at what is to be considered a basic right, which in itself suggests a prioritization of basics rights. The most basic, of course, is the right to life, which is embodied by both security and subsistence rights, violations of which often result in death. Any international treatment of an individual that permanently places him or her in a condition whereby he or she cannot in the future hope to enjoy any other right is therefore a violation of a basic right. Death is such a condition. Other "less permanent" but conceivably perpetual conditions include enslavement, impairment from physical abuse, and forcible Expulsion, the aim of which is to destroy the victim by treating him or her as entirely disposable. Violations of basic rights, then, are the most serious violations of human rights. AND The responsibility to protect human rights does not change because people live in a different country This more specific moral thesis: that our global institutional order is to be assessed and reformed principally by reference to its relative impact on human rights fulfillment. This is one way of saying that human rights in our time have global normative reach: A person's human rights entail not merely moral claims on the institutional order of her own society, which are claims against her fellow citizens, but also analogous moral claims on the global institutional order, which are claims against her fellow human beings. Our responsibilities entailed by human rights are engaged by our participation in any coercively imposed institutional order in which some persons avoidably lack secure access to the objects of their human rights, and these (negative) responsibilities are extended, then, through the emergence of a global institutional order in whose coercive imposition we collaborate. CONTENTION TWO Allowing intervention urges an ethic of international cooperation If we appreciated the full force of the principle of common humanity underlying humanitarian intervention and integrated it into the normal pattern of interstatal relations, we would see states as both autonomous and part of a wider community, bounded yet open, both self-determining and accountable to mankind, and having obligations both to their own citizens and to their moral kith and kin outside. We would then appreciate the moral need to share our material, political, ethical and cultural resources with the rest of mankind, and to cooperate in creating a just, peaceful and relaxed world in which many of the causes that generate the need for humanitarian intervention would disappear. Injustices, inequalities and mutual suspicions and fears, however, are not the only causes of grave civil disorder, and the human capacity for brutality does not always follow the laws of political rationality. States may become a living hell, and the outside world may then need to intervene. We therefore need what J.S. Mill called "some rule or criterion" to decide when humanitarian intervention is justified and in what form. In conclusion, having supported my value of equality, I urge a affirmation of the resolution that The United States is justified in intervening in the internal political processes of other countries to attempt to stop human rights abuses.