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Indivisibility is the idea that no human right can be fully realized without fully realizing all other human rights. When indivisibility occurs it has the practical consequence that countries cannot pick and choose among rights. This article offers a framework for understanding supporting relations between rights and gives a number of arguments against strong claims of indivisibility. A central thesis is that the strength of supporting relations between rights varies with quality of implementation. Rights with low quality implementation provide little support to other rights. This is why early UN formulations of indivisibility said that it occurs when the rights in question are fully realized. Even if strong claims about the indivisibility were true under high quality implementation, they would be of limited relevance to developing countries because high quality implementation of rights is generally not an immediate possibility in those countries. Developing countries do not run afoul of indivisibility if they implement some rights before others.

Issue Title: Festschrift on Richard T. De George

Linkage arguments, which defend a controversial right by showing that it is indispensable or highly useful to an uncontroversial right, are sometimes used to defend the right to health care (RHC). This article evaluates such arguments when used to defend RHC. Three common errors in using linkage arguments are (1) neglecting levels of implementation, (2) expanding the scope of the supported right beyond its uncontroversial domain, and (3) giving too much credit to the supporting right for outcomes in its area. A familiar linkage argument for RHC focuses on its contributions to the right to life. Among the problems with this argument are that it requires a positive conception of the right to life that is not uncontroversial and that it only justifies the subset of RHC that seeks to prevent loss of life. A linkage argument for RHC with better prospects claims that a well-realized right to health care enhances the realization of a number of uncontroversial rights.

This fully revised and extended edition of James Nickel’s classic study explains and defends the contemporary conception of human rights. Combining philosophical, legal and political approaches, Nickel explains international human rights law and addresses questions of justification and feasibility. New, revised edition of James Nickel's classic study. Explains and defends the conception of human rights found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and subsequent treaties in a clear and lively style. Covers fundamental freedoms, due process rights, social rights, and minority rights. Updated throughout to include developments in law, politics, and theory since the publication of the first edition. New features for this edition include an extensive bibliography and a chapter on human rights and terrorism.

Like people born shortly after World War II, the international human rights movement recently had its sixty-fifth birthday. This could mean that retirement is at hand and that death will come in a few decades. After all, the formulations of human rights that activists, lawyers, and politicians use today mostly derive from the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the world in 1948 was very different from our world today: the cold war was about to break out, communism was a strong and optimistic political force in an expansionist phase, and Western Europe was still recovering from the war. The struggle against entrenched racism and sexism had only just begun, decolonization was in its early stages, and Asia was still poor (Japan was under military reconstruction, and Mao's heavy-handed revolution in China was still in the future). Labor unions were strong in the industrialized world, and the movement of women into work outside the home and farm was in its early stages. Farming was less technological and usually on a smaller scale, the environmental movement had not yet flowered, and human-caused climate change was present but unrecognized. Personal computers and social networking were decades away, and Earth's human population was well under three billion.

This reply discusses Pablo Gilabert's response to my article, \"Rethinking Indivisibility.\" It welcomes his distinction between conceptual, normative, epistemic, and causal forms of support from one right to another. It denies, however, that \"Rethinking Indivisibility\" downplayed linkage arguments for human rights (although it did call for careful evaluation of such arguments), and rejects Gilabert's suggestion that we understand the indivisibility of two rights as two rights being highly useful to each other (interdependence) rather than as mutual indispensability. In the final section, I offer two new worries about the system-wide indivisibility of human rights.

I defend economic and social rights as human rights, and as a feasible approach to addressing world poverty. I propose a modest conception of economic and social rights that includes rights to subsistence, basic health care and basic education. The second part of the paper defends these three rights. I begin by sketching a pluralistic justificatory framework that starts with norms pertaining to life, leading a life, avoiding severely cruel treatment, and avoiding severe unfairness. I argue that economic and social rights are not excessively burdensome on their addressees and that they are feasible worldwide in the appropriate sense. Severe poverty violates economic and social rights, and accordingly generates high‐priority duties of many parties to work towards its elimination.

Enthusiasts of the idea of globalization often view international human rights institutions as part of an emerging global governance regime. They claim that these institutions illustrate how state sovereignty is being diminished. This paper looks at the international system for the promotion and protection of human rights as part of normative globalization. It argues that this system does not constitute a system of global governance, although in some areas it comes close.