Hampson, Fen and Christopher Penny. "Human Security", In The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations, edited by Sam Daws and Thomas G. Weiss. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Hampson, Fen and Christopher Penny. "Human Security", In The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations, edited by Sam Daws and Thomas G. Weiss. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

• Human security is now a central concept in security discourses globally, largely due to the prominent role of the UN in institutionalizing the change from a state-focused perception of security to one focused on the protection of individuals and their human rights (539).
• This new notion of human security pushed forward by the UN also advanced a controversial notion that since human rights are paramount, they can in cases trump the rights of states of sovereignty (539).
• The concept of human security is broad and contains three main strands of security focuses. The first is the protection of basic human rights and freedoms as enshrined in the UN. The second is 'freedom from free' interpreted as preventing violent conflicts. The third is 'freedom from want', guarantee basic environmental, sanitary, and nutritional conditions necessary for life (540).
• Human security concepts had been developed in piecemeal for decades, but the fully-flushed concept of 'human security' was first addressed by the UN in the 1994 report of the UNDP, which focused on the security of individuals as defined by their access to day-to-day necessities (552).
• The modern connection between human rights and international security goes back at least to the Treaty of Westphalia, in which states agreed that respect for religious minorities was one preconditions for avoiding further conflict. Broader conceptions of minority rights as stabilizing spread during the long 19th Century, being explicitly codified in the 14 points of President Wilson after WWI. This project still prioritized state action and state rights, however, leading to the human rights failures of the interwar period and the Second World War (540-541).
• The atrocities committed during the Second World War underscored the need for an established regime of human rights that could protect individuals from states (541).
• The UN, although it can theoretically authorize military force, generally has two tools to enforce human rights and human security: shaming offenders through public denunciation at the UN human rights bodies, and economic sanctions (543-544).
• The UN has also been important in securing human rights in situations of conflict, often forcing parties to reconcile with past crimes and jointly punish offenders in civil wars. They have also been involved in setting up 'truth committees' in a number of post-conflict countries (544).
• Legal ad hoc agreements had previously existed between armies, formal legal regimes protecting civilians in wartime and mandating conduct in war began in the 1860s with the adoption of the first Geneva Convention in 1864, dealing with wounded soldiers. It was expanded throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries (545-546).
• Norms on the conduct of warfare expanded to limitations of certain varieties of unnecessarily harmful weapons, beginning with restriction on the use of expanding 'dum-dum' bullets in 1868 (546).
• A general agreement on the legal rules of conduct in land warfare, called the Martens Clause, was developed in 1899 during an international conference at the Hague. It specifically calls for protection of civilians (546).
• International politics sometimes prevents the UN from quickly intervening in conflicts, in some cases leading to forceful intervention by other states or organizations. The UN sometimes plays a role in the post-conflict process in these cases, however, like the nation-building role of the UN in Liberia and Sierra Leone following ECOMOG intervention (547).
• Following the late intervention of NATO forces in the Yugoslav Wars in 1999, the Canadian government established the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. In 2001, the body produced the quintessential justification of the Responsibility to Protect, which argued that the UNSC should authorize force to stop mass killing even if that action would violate state sovereignty (548).
• The first international organization designed to aid those in humanitarian disasters caused by war was the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, founded in 1943 and distributing aid to war-ravaged areas of Europe until 1947 and the Marshall Plan. A more permanent institution was created in the UN High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR] in 1951, although many UN bodies provided some form of humanitarian assistance (548).
• In the late 1980s and 1990s, as many conflicts reignited, there was a feeling that previous UN programs had failed to create a lasting peace. Under the leadership of Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali, the UN instituted the idea of 'peace-building' programs as an integral element of security (549).
• This focus on peace-building was a major step towards a concept of human security, as the causes of conflict to be addressed now focused on socio-economic factors, poverty, access to good government, issues in rule of law, and lack of democracy (549-550).
• The last element of human security, "focuses on nonmilitary threats that originate from a wide variety of problems such as unchecked global population growth, migration, disparities in economic opportunities, in particular the widening income gap between the world's rich and poor, ecological destruction, and the rise of pandemic and infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS and SARS" (551).
• The protection of these rights dates back to the International Covenant on Social, Economic, and Cultural Rights, which stresses these elements of human security as UN priorities (551). 
• The concept became applied to specific elements of human security in the 1970s, when the FAO began to discuss the provision of 'food security'. Other international organizations ran with this idea of resource security, with related concepts like water security, energy security, and environmental security being developed (552).