The United Nations deals with human rights questions either through the use of "preventive diplomacy" and "public pressure" or, more rarely, through direct intervention (Boutros-Ghali 91 2). Increasingly, however, it has become difficult in many cases to separate the protection of human rights from either direct military intervention or from missions to provide humanitarian aid. UN interventions take place where there is a very serious need for humanitarian aid (as in the recent mission to Somalia) or a need for an outside force to broker peace and keep cease fires in place (as in the current intervention in Bosnia). The UN does not directly intervene in most cases where a sovereign state is engaged in the regular, daily violation of the rights of its citizens. in those cases the UN works from outside by attempting to provide aid, relief and education, by imposing sanctions, and by trying to arrange agreements between parties that will restore human rights to the people. Yet even when operating from the outside and not directly interfering in a nation's problems, the UN's human rights efforts are contiguous with its "efforts to maintain peace and security" ("Ethnic" 72). In recent years the UN has begun to place increased importance on the protection of human rights and to merge it with the rest of its security functions. This has led to greater involvement in civil wars where rights protection is badly needed.
The UN has been moving toward a new definition of security in which the idea of "human security" is supplementing the old Cold War view of this function. In the postwar era the standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union created a balance of power in which the avoidance of nuclear confrontation was of primary importance. In addition to changing the nature of the nuclear threat the breakup of the USSR has produced a world with the conflicting trends of increased "globalization" and increased "fragmentation"...