The right to have rights: Why human rights need a country
An accessible guide to Hannah Arendt's 'right to have rights': what the phrase means, why she argued that rights depend on belonging to a political community, the dispute that keeps the idea alive, and what statelessness looks like now.
In 1937 the German state stripped Hannah Arendt of her citizenship. She had fled Germany in 1933 after a brief arrest by the Gestapo, and was by then living in Paris, working for organisations that moved Jewish children out of Europe. Interned in 1940 as an "enemy alien", she escaped and reached New York in 1941, becoming an American citizen in the early 1950s. 1 Out of those years came the essay published in January 1943 as "We Refugees", which opens by objecting to its own title: "In the first place, we don't like to be called 'refugees.'" 2
We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings. 2
The argument those years produced is remembered by a phrase short enough to be mistaken for a slogan: the right to have rights.
What the phrase names
Arendt set it out in The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951.
We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one's actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation. 3
That sentence carries three things at once, and arguments about the phrase usually slide between them.
| Sense | What it names | Anchored in |
|---|---|---|
| Membership | A standing inside "some kind of organized community" — the difference between a person and a person of no country | Arendt's sentence above |
| Appearance | A place "where one is judged by one's actions and opinions": a person who speaks and is answered, rather than a specimen of a category | Arendt's own gloss on the phrase |
| Enforcement | An authority obliged to act when a right is violated — the loss of "a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever" | Arendt's account of what the rightless lost 3 |
Sitting beside "human rights", the phrase reads like a stronger version of the same idea. It names the condition on which a declaration of human rights depends. Arendt's charge is that the great declarations presupposed a bearer — "an 'abstract' human being who seemed to exist nowhere" — while the power to enforce anything stayed with states that act for their nationals. 3 The declarations had bound the two together: the rights of man were proclaimed in the same breath as the sovereignty of the people, so that "the people, and not the individual, was the image of man". 3
Seyla Benhabib supplies the reading most used since. She takes the phrase as splitting in two: "a moral claim to membership and a certain form of treatment compatible with the claim to membership", and beneath it the rights that a member of a political community already holds. 4
Where the phrase came from
The occasion was a specific institutional failure. The treaties that ended the First World War dissolved the Austro-Hungarian and Czarist empires and set up successor states, then attached minority treaties, guaranteed by the League of Nations, for the people left on the wrong side of the new borders. Arendt read those treaties as saying "in plain language ... that only nationals could be citizens, only people of the same national origin could enjoy the full protection of legal institutions". 3
Arendt's figure for what those treaties conceded is blunt. About 30 per cent of the roughly 100 million people in the successor states were officially recognised as exceptions in need of special protection, and in some of those states the peoples without a government of their own made up half the population. 3
Then came denationalisation at scale. In 1921 the Soviet government revoked the citizenship of Russians living abroad, including some 800,000 civil-war refugees, and the League answered in 1922 with an identity certificate for stateless refugees: the Nansen passport, named for Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer who promoted it. It ran until 1938, was extended to Armenians in 1924 and to Assyrian, Bulgarian and Turkish refugees in 1928, and about 450,000 were issued. By 1942, 52 governments honoured them. 5
Arendt drew the general lesson from a pile of cases like these. "Denationalization became a powerful weapon of totalitarian politics", she wrote, and the constitutional inability of nation-states to guarantee rights to people who had lost national rights let persecuting governments impose their standards on their opponents. 3
Why a right needs a community
The mechanism is enforcement. A right that no institution is obliged to act on is a sentence in a document, and in the state system the institution is the state, which acts for its nationals. A person with no nationality has nobody obliged to act. Arendt's summary: "Man, it turns out, can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity." 3
Two observations in the chapter do the diagnostic work. The first is undeportability: the stateless person was "an anomaly for whom there is no appropriate niche in the framework of the general law", so the ordinary remedy against a foreigner, deportation, had nowhere to send him. The second is Arendt's test for whether someone has been pushed outside the law: "if a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived of human rights." She was describing a working arrangement, in which a stateless man could become a "respectable person" by acquiring a criminal record, because the law provides for criminals and for nobody else. 3
Arendt's own conclusion is more cautious than its reception. She calls the right to have rights "the right of every individual to belong to humanity", says it "should be guaranteed by humanity itself", and adds at once: "It is by no means certain whether this is possible." International law, she notes, still runs on treaties between sovereign states, and a sphere above the nations does not exist. 3
She considered the obvious fix and set it aside on the same grounds. A world government is "within the realm of possibility", she wrote, but a single authority deciding what is good for the whole can also conclude "quite democratically — namely by majority decision — that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof." 3
The argument that runs the other way
| Position | Its claim | What it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Arendt (1951) | Rights need a community willing and able to enforce them, so the first right is the right to belong to one. 3 | Why the declarations of human rights failed the stateless. |
| Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others (2004) | She keeps the diagnosis and rejects the remedy: a founding "will always include some and exclude others", so the moral claim to membership has to be justified to everyone and worked out through "democratic iterations" across porous borders. 4 | Where an outsider's claim comes from if membership comes first. |
| Jacques Rancière, "Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?" (2004) | Separating the citizen's political life from mere life leaves the rights of man "either void or a justification for humanitarian interventions"; the rights belong to those who have none, and are asserted by them. 6 | The charge that the stateless figure only as objects of pity. |
| Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End (2008) | The refugee works as a limit concept that exposes the fiction that birth and nation coincide. 6 | Whether the nation-state can be patched or has to be rethought. |
| Christoph Menke (2007, 2014) | Human dignity, read through Arendt, is the right to have rights. 6 | Whether Arendt's position can ground any normative claim at all. |
Read side by side, these five agree about the fact that needs explaining: the nation-state's grip on membership, and the helplessness of anyone outside it. They divide over whether that grip is a premise to work within. The disagreement between Arendt and Rancière is the sharpest, because it turns on the direction of causation — whether a claim of right can create the standing it needs, or can only be made from inside one that already exists.
Arendt's framework draws a second criticism that her defenders have to answer. The We Refugees Archive's reading of her work calls her analysis "fundamentally Eurocentric" and says that her division of the world into a "civilized" part and a "barbaric" one has to be rejected rather than inherited. 7 Her 1959 essay on the school desegregation crisis in Little Rock, criticised from the moment it appeared, is the case those critics cite most often. 1
What is left of the argument
At the end of December 2025, UNHCR's statistical reporting counted 4.5 million stateless people, and the agency states that the real figure is believed to be much higher, since many stateless people live outside official records. 8 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights already declares that "everyone has the right to a nationality", and two conventions address the problem directly: the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. UNHCR works to a Global Action Plan setting out 11 actions, launched a Global Alliance to End Statelessness in 2024 with more than 140 members, and between 2014 and 2024 secured citizenship for half a million people through its #IBelong campaign. 8
Latvia shows the limits of instruments that work through states. Its "non-citizens" (nepilsoņi) were created in 1991, when the restored state recognised as citizens only those who had held Latvian citizenship before the 1940 Soviet occupation, together with their descendants. Everyone else already resident became a person with a passport that belongs to no country: roughly 715,000 people at the outset, and 183,796 in July 2023. 9 Latvia has passed about eighty laws limiting what that status allows, barring non-citizens from more than thirty professions and from the citizenship rights that come with the European Union, while maintaining that they are Latvian nationals under full state protection. The OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and Amnesty International describe the situation as statelessness. Since January 2020, children born in Latvia receive citizenship automatically whatever their parents' status. 9
That is Arendt's succession-state problem produced a second time, by the dissolution of another empire. Elsewhere the registered populations are larger: about 630,000 in Myanmar, nearly all Rohingya; about 952,300 in Bangladesh; about 931,100 in Côte d'Ivoire; about 574,200 in Thailand. 10 These are counts of people a state has formally determined to be stateless, which is why UNHCR treats the total as a floor. 10 Arendt drew the same distinction in 1951, between about a million "recognized" stateless and more than ten million "de facto" stateless — people who held a nationality that had stopped protecting them. 3
A reading frame
Four questions do most of the work on a claim about rights and belonging.
- Which sense is in play? A claim about a right, a claim about standing to speak, and a claim about who will enforce something are three different claims. Ask which one the sentence needs, and whether the evidence offered supports that one.
- Who holds the power over the status? Nationality is state law. Find the rule that grants or removes it, and the office that administers it.
- Run Arendt's two tests. Is the person deportable anywhere? Would a criminal conviction improve their legal position? If deportation has nowhere to go and a conviction would help, membership is the missing piece. 3
- Check the document against the reality. A nationality can exist on paper and fail in practice — the gap Arendt measured between a million recognised and ten million de facto stateless people, and the gap Latvia's critics describe between holding a passport and holding the rights that go with one. 3
The dispute underneath all four is the one the phrase was invented to name: whether rights create membership, or membership creates rights. Arendt held the second view, doubted that humanity could supply the first, and left the question open where her own case had put it.
References
- 1Wikipedia, "Hannah Arendt"
en.wikipedia.org
- 2Hannah Arendt, "We Refugees" (1943)
amroali.com
- 3Hannah Arendt, *The Origins of Totalitarianism* (1951), ch. 9
thetedkarchive.com
- 4Sharon Todd, "Seyla Benhabib on rights and the borders of belonging" (2006)
mural.maynoothuniversity.ie
- 5Wikipedia, "Nansen passport"
en.wikipedia.org
- 6Leila Faghfouri Azar, "Hannah Arendt: The Right to Have Rights", *Critical Legal Thinking* (2019)
criticallegalthinking.com
- 7We Refugees Archive, "Rethinking and Thinking Beyond Arendt: On the Lost Right to Have Rights"
en.we-refugees-archive.org
- 8UNHCR, "Ending statelessness"
unhcr.org
- 9Wikipedia, "Non-citizens (Latvia)"
en.wikipedia.org
- 10Wikipedia, "Statelessness"
en.wikipedia.org
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