NAT SEC

The Value is government legitimacy because the goal of any

government must be to maintain power and the support of its
populace. Minimally a legal structure that encourages more violence is
antithetical to principles of rule of law and requires reformation.
Individuals would not consent to a legal system that fails to protect
rights. The purpose of law is to instill order and reduce violence. Thus,
governments have a first order obligation to reduce violence.
However, government obligations only arise domestically. Governments
have an obligation to protect their citizens but not everyone.
David Luban,

[Professor of Law and Philosophy at Georgetown University explains in the Yale Law Journal in 2004: [Frederick Haas
Professor of Law and Philosophy, Georgetown University Law Center, ARTICLE: A Theory of Crimes Against Humanity, The Yale Journal of
International Law, Winter, 2004, 29 Yale J. Int'l L. 85 p. 126]

The ban on crimes against humanityarising, supposedly, from all humankinds revulsion at the gravest possible offensespresents itself as a more powerful norm than any

international norms are less powerful than domestic norms, because they have
less connection with legitimate political processes of lawmaking.
In domestic law, it is the connection between the
that we can think of. But

state, the legal norms it promulgates, and the community whose values those norms express that makes the state a legitimate party in interest when those norms are
transgressed. Legitimacy arises from the consent of the governedfrom popular sovereignty institutionalized through democratic governance mechanisms. If legitimacy
requires popular sovereignty, then international law, formed by state actions and diplomatic undertakings many steps removed from popular control, necessarily has less
legitimacy than domestic law. As Paul Kahn puts it: The rule of law is not simply a matter of getting the content of rights correct. It is first of all an expression of our sense of
ourselves as a single, historical community engaging in self-government through law. To obey the law, on this conception, is to participate in the project of popular sovereignty.
That project makes us a single community with a uniqueand uniquely meaningfulhistory. It seems plain that just as all humankind has no such common project, neither

A state is charged with advancing the interests of its own

people, not of people in general. To be sure, governments may fall far short of advancing the interests of their own people, but even if they do not,
their duties to their own people are likely to make them unresponsive to universal human
interests, precisely because domestic interests come first. This is no less true in democracies than in tyrannies: popular
sovereignty means the sovereignty of our people, not all of people everywhere.
does the international community of states. On the contrary.

States have an obligation to protect the rights of their citizens because

individuals give up their right to self-defense under the assumption
that the government will safeguard their rights and protect them from
violence. The formation of the state is predicated on this obligation
and as such, protection of citizens is the states primary goal.
Thus, the standard is promoting U.S. national interests.

-1-