Universal Jurisdiction and the Enforcement of Human Rights

This paper will first examine the question of national sovereignty and the protections of states against international intervention. After arguing for the use of act-based over systemic criteria, I will move to the next step in the discussion and ask what sort of act-based criteria are best to use. What sort of acts should we identify as those that compromise the sovereignty of states in which they are committed? Or, to put it differently, what universal rights are to be protected coercively (by military intervention or something similar)? Third, by examining some current policies, I will show that there are existing legal norms to which we can turn in realizing the concept of universal jurisdiction as I will describe it; it is not necessary to reinvent the wheel, and a legal framework is already in place on which to build