The Secretary General has often declared himself firmly on the side of defending human rights. For example, it was not his choice to let the UN's outspoken High Commissioner for Human Rights go last September. But by most accounts, Mary Robinson's reappointment was not favored by the Bush administration because she questioned the treatment of suspected terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay and let it be known she was unhappy about some other rights aspects of the post-Sept. 11, 2001 war. (Robinson, a former president of Ireland, is continuing her personal campaign on the human rights front as a nongovernmental advocate from an office in Manhattan. Her successor likely will mind his tongue if he wants to keep his job.)

Annan, in remarks delivered at Tilburg University in the Netherlands after his latest trip to Kosovo this week, referred back to another speech of his -- also delivered in the Netherlands, in 1999 at the centennial of The Hague Peace Conference -- in which he advanced a doctrine that national sovereignty must never become a shield behind which states could commit "gross and systematic abuses of human rights." That idea found no favor among several third world leaders evidently fearful that some of their own unsavory behavior might be uncovered if Annan's idea was followed through. Nonetheless, he clings to it.

Returning to the theme in Tilburg address, he said, "This question goes to the very heart of the credibility and authority of the international community. It centers on our collective ability to prevent large-scale losses of innocent civilian life. After Srebrenica [where Dutch soldiers in the UN peacekeeping force did little or nothing to stem a massacre], after Rwanda [where the UN Security Council, while Annan was in charge of peacekeeping at the time, turned a deaf ear to warnings of an impending murderous rampage that eventually was to claim at least 800,000 lives], after genocide, all of us need to affirm that sovereignty means responsibilities as well as powers; and that among those responsibilities, none is more important than protecting [civilian] citizens from violence in war."

More easily said than done, however. Recently published numbers have disclosed that for every soldier who died in war in the past several years there were a minimum of six civilian fatalities. This is an adverse ratio that opponents of going to war against Iraq are sure to want to emphasize as the debate on this issue grows louder. How much more must the Iraqi civilian population suffer, on top of what has already been inflicted upon it by Saddam Hussein? Expect that question to be asked often.

"I have proposed," Annan went on at Tilburg, "that we think about two notions of sovereignty: one for states, another for individuals, and that whenever the two come into conflict, we as an international community think hard about whether -- and how far -- it is right to give primacy to the former over the latter. Human rights, and the evolving nature of humanitarian law, will be unacceptably limited if the principle of state sovereignty is always allowed to trump the protection of citizens within those states."

In the environment after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, an understandable focus on preventing "still more terrible terrorist acts has increased concerns about the price we must pay in terms of cherished rights and liberties," Annan said. "We face a nearly unsolvable conflict between two imperatives of modern life -- protecting the traditional civil liberties of our citizens and, at the same time, ensuring their safety from terrorist attacks with catastrophic consequences."

States have not only the right but also the duty to protect their citizens against terrrorist threats, he continued, but they must also take the greatest care to ensure that counterterrorism measures do not mutate into measures used to cloak or justify rights violations.

"Terrorism has a nasty habit of causing the whole spectrum on opinion in a society to lurch in a repressive direction," the Secretary Geneal said.

"Even as many are rightly praising the unity and resolve of the international community in this crucial struggle, important and urgent questions are being asked about what might be called the 'collateral damage' of the war on terrorism -- damage to the presumption of innocence, to precious human rights, to the rule of law, and to the very fabric of democratic governance."

The danger is, he posited, that domestically states end up sacrificing crucial liberties and weakening common security, not strengthening it, thereby corroding the vessel of democratic government from within. Alluding to the treatment of ethnic and cultural minority citizens in Western countries and the rights of migrants and asylum seekers, the Secretary General said, "Vigilance must be exercised by all thoughtful citizens to ensure that entire groups in our societies are not tarred with one broad brush and punished for the reprehensible behavior of a few."

Internationally, he said, "we are beginning to see the increasing use of what I call the T-word, terrorism, to demonize political opponents, to throttle freedom of speech and the press, and to delegitimize legitimate political grievances."

Too many cases are being seen, he said, of states living in tension with their neighbors making opportunistic use of he fight against terrorism to threaten or justify new military action on long-running disputes.

"Just as terorism must never be excused, so must geneunine grievances never be ignored," Annan said. "True, it tarnishes a cause when a few wicked men commit murder in its name. But it does not make it any less urgent that the cause be addressed, the grievances heard, the wrong put right. Otherwise, we risk losing the contest for the hearts and minds of much of mankind."

Evidently fearing that his important remarks be misinterpreted, the Secretary General underscored that he did not argue there is not a grave threat from international terrorism. "Terrorism is a global thrreat with global effects," he said. "Its methods are murder and mayehm, but its consequences affect every aspect of the United Nations agenda -- from development to peace to human rights and the rulle of law. No part of the United Nations mission is safe from the effects of terrorism, and no part of the worlld is immune from this scourge.

"The United Nations has a clear obligation to deal with this global threat. The United Nations has an indispensable role to play in providing the legal and organizational framework within which the international camapaign against terrorism can unfold. But our unrelenting position must be that any sacrifice of freedom or the rule of law within states, or any generation of new disputes between states in the name of antiterrorism, is to hand the terrorists a victory that no act of theirs alone could possibly bring."