What can we do when faced with atrocities being committed on a monstrous scale? It is an old question, but it has taken on a renewed urgency with the advent of new communications technologies and mass media eager to exploit them in the competition for viewers. Being blind to distant injustices is a luxury -- it allows governments and their publics to avoid hard choices. But the agonizing over Kosovo, East Timor and Sierra Leone (to name three gruesome recent episodes) provides the backdrop for the most important debate in the United Nations: how to balance human rights with national sovereignty in the 21st century.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan threw down the gauntlet in a speech that opened the 54th session of the General Assembly earlier this week. Mr. Annan was unequivocal: "The core challenge to the U.N. is to forge unity behind the principle that massive and systematic violations of human rights -- whenever they occur -- should not be allowed to stand." Few would disagree, in the abstract. Nor can they: The defense of human rights is enshrined in the U.N. Charter, as well as numerous treaties and conventions.

The problem is turning those aspirations into policy. The secretary general correctly noted that "words of sympathy" are not enough; a "real commitment" is required. That commitment takes aim at the most important pillar of the international system: national sovereignty. Mr. Annan said that frontiers cannot serve as an absolute defense against sovereign impunity. In plain speech, that means the international community has the right -- if not the obligation -- to intervene forcibly to prevent governments from abusing their own citizens.