RIO DE JANEIRO — Last week, a photograph of Dilma Rousseff’s terrorism trial in 1970 circulated on the Internet, sending shockwaves across Brazil. She was 22 and an active member of a guerrilla cell fighting the dictatorial regime of the day. In the shot, young Dilma looks pretty and clean-faced, like a freedom-fighter girl taking on a gerontocracy of mighty generals.

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The contrast with her accusers is stark. They may be the ones wearing the uniforms and carrying the guns, but it is they who look frightened, too meek to face the camera. When the photo was taken, Rousseff was already in custody and had been repeatedly tortured. She ended up serving a three-year sentence.

Looking at that picture today, you cannot but think of the thousand youths who are now taking up arms against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria: Perhaps one day one of them will be democratically elected to run the place.

And you cannot but think of Rousseff’s recent opposition to U.N. sanctions, let alone intervention, against Assad.

Rousseff’s position on Syria has come under heavy criticism. Democratic countries like Brazil “shouldn’t sit by and watch as Syria implodes,” Human Rights Watch has declared. “Their efforts at private dialogue have achieved nothing, and hundreds more Syrians have died in the meantime.”

When Brazil abstained this spring from voting on the U.N. Security Council resolution that helped rid Libya of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, its position elicited a similar rebuff. Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., chided Brazil, along with India and South Africa, for taking a stance “that one might not have anticipated, given that each of them came out of strong and proud democratic traditions.”

Rousseff’s views about Libya and Syria make me uneasy, too: Growing up in South America in the 1970s, when state officials captured, tortured, exiled or killed our compatriots, I’m not comfortable with shows of tolerance toward the Assads and Qaddafis of this world.

But to suggest that her stance is hypocritical or belies her democratic convictions is to miss her point. At bottom, she is resisting the pull from Paris, London and Washington to coerce governments that have fallen in their disrepute. And she is denouncing the dangers inherent in the rising tide of humanitarian interventionism.

In her view, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973, the first one ever to invoke the “responsibility to protect,” only authorized a no-flight zone over Libya, and that was too easily used to justify a NATO-led bombing operation against Colonel Qaddafi. As her foreign minister put it in November, Brazil fears that in the future humanitarian arguments “might be misused for purposes other than protecting civilians, such as regime change.” (View a pdf of the statement.)

The intervening forces did turn a blind eye to Resolution 1973’s call for a cease-fire so as to allow the Libyan opposition to rearm. And when the fighting was all over, the foreign minister of France demanded oil contracts as repayment for liberation services rendered.

All along, Rousseff has been arguing that foreign interventions designed to protect civilians must be tightly regulated: “The Security Council must ensure the accountability of those to whom authority is granted to resort to force.” Last month, she circulated a concept paper (pdf) for discussion at the U.N. Security Council entitled “Responsibility While Protecting.” It argues that without limits on what the powerful may do, the emerging ideology of humanitarian intervention could easily turn into a tool for foreign manipulation.

Some U.S. diplomats I spoke with dismissed Rousseff’s paper as mere anti-American banter; others thought that with a few tweaks it could help develop new standards. All, however, insisted that the Libya intervention be celebrated as a model for the future: a show of force that was quick and decisive and properly approved by the U.N. After a decade of disastrous warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, surely this is the way forward. Right?

Not so fast. The Arab Spring has not been particularly pro-American or pro-European, and discontent with foreign interventions in the Muslim world may end up fueling resentment against the West. It would be a shame if the cause of human rights were thus tainted by the colors of imperial reassertion.

To prevent this, Rousseff should more clearly state her very sensible position. She must warn her colleagues in the North and the South, the East and the West that even if U.N.-sponsored interventions on behalf of freedom are here to stay, unless new rules of conduct are put into place to tame those who take action, the “responsibility to protect” may come to endanger us all.