Should sovereignty be downgraded?

If Amitai Etzioni has his way, the traditional understanding of state sovereignty would be modified from a right to a responsibility.

Thus a government that does not protect its people from ethnic cleansing, of the kind that occurred in Kosovo and Rwanda, or from mass starvation as found in Niger, would be considered a government that has forfeited its right to independence. The UN would be fully entitled to authorize an intervention in the internal affairs of that nation, a major departure from the Charter of the UN, which declares, “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the jurisdiction of any state.”

Would this be practicable? More to the point, is the UN up to taking on this responsibility? Perhaps this is where Russ Kuykendall's proposed Community of Democracies has a role to play.