Human Rights Between Legitimacy and Justice

Human rights emerge in international political theory as a broadly accepted standard of state legitimacy. From military interventions through development politics to territorial rights and sovereignty, philosophers of international politics and relations often agree that human rights constitute an appropriate standard to assess the legitimacy of state action and, consequently, states’ rights and obligations. Seen from this perspective, a state that complies with the required standards of human rights retains its right to non-intervention to its territory and sovereignty and is worthy of development aid. At the same time human rights – civil, political, social, economic, environmental and cultural – feature as a standard for and an essential component of domestic justice in liberal, republican and democratic theory and politics. Human rights as domestic justice and human rights as international legitimacy evidently mean two different things. The human rights standards that a state is expected to fulfill for the legitimacy test are very far from satisfying the human rights standards in domestic theories of justice. The paper explores the tensions between the two notions of human rights – as legitimacy and as justice: is legitimacy simply a diminished or minimal justice and is thus fulfilled by lesser standards of human rights? Does the use of minimal human rights standards internationally undercut the critical drive of human rights domestically? Are there two conceptions of human rights that are being mistakenly conflated? I argue for a distinction between internal and external legitimacy that can help make sense of the use of diverse human rights standards.