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The Sover eignty of Human R ights
The Sovereignty of Human Rights
Patrick Macklem
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of
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You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Macklem, Patrick, author.
The sovereignty of human rights / Patrick Macklem.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-026731-5 ((hardback) : alk. paper)
1. Human rights. 2. Civil rights. I. Title.
K3240.M3215 2015
342.08'5—dc23
2015006707
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Note to Readers
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter
covered. It is based upon sources believed to be accurate and reliable and is intended to be current as of the
time it was written. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal,
accounting, or other professional services. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a
competent professional person should be sought. Also, to confirm that the information has not been affected
or changed by recent developments, traditional legal research techniques should be used, including checking
primary sources where appropriate.
(Based on the Declaration of Principles jointly adopted by a Committee of the

American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations.)
You may order this or any other Oxford University Press publication
by visiting the Oxford University Press website at www.oup.com
For Courtney
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1. Field Missions 1
Human Rights as Moral Concepts 3
Human Rights as Political Concepts 13
Human Rights as Legal Concepts 18
The Plan of the Book 26
2. Sovereignty and Structure 29

Sovereignty and Its Exercise 31
Between the National and International 37
Sovereignty and Its Distribution 45
3. Human Rights: Three Generations or One? 51

Generations as Chronological Categories 52
Generations as Analytical Categories 58
Civil and Political Rights as Monitors of Sovereignty’s Exercise 64
Social and Economic Rights as Monitors of Sovereignty’s Exercise 67
4. International Law at Work 73

Labor Rights as Instrumental Rights 76
Labor Rights as Universal Rights 84
Labor Rights and the Structure of International Law 95
vii
viii Contents
5. The Ambiguous Appeal of Minority Rights 103

The Moral Ambiguities of Minority Rights 105
The Political Ambiguities of Minority Rights 117
The Interdependence of Sovereignty and Minority Protection 124
6. International Indigenous Recognition 133

Indigenous Territories and the Acquisition of Sovereignty 136
Indigenous Recognition and the International Labor Organization 141
Indigenous Recognition and the United Nations 152
The Purpose of International Indigenous Rights 156
7. Self-Determination in Three Movements 163

Self-Determination and the Legality of Colonialism 165
The Many Paradoxes of Self-Determination 174
Bridging International Law and Distributive Justice 182
8. Global Poverty and the Right to Development 185

The Emergence of the Right 188
Implementing the Right 198
From Global Poverty to International Law 206
The Right to Development and the Rise and Fall of Colonialism 217
Bibliogr aphy 225

Index 247
Acknowledgments
i first conceived of this book when I was a Fellow at the School of Social
Science at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey. Many
thanks to Danielle Allen, Joan Scott, and Michael Walzer for their gracious hos-
pitality and our countless conversations that shaped this project at its outset. I also
wish to thank my colleagues at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, an insti-
tution with an unparalleled group of international legal scholars and legal theorists
from whom I have learned so much.
Over the years, I have had discussions about the various themes and arguments
that comprise this book with many friends and colleagues. Thanks to Roy Adams,
Andrew Arato, Jutta Brunée, Vincent Chiao, Jean Cohen, Dennis Davis, Ron
Daniels, David Dyzenhaus, Karen Engle, Willy Forbath, Evan Fox-Decent, Judy
Fudge, Michael Ignatieff, Karen Knop, Brian Langille, Frédéric Mégret, Ed Morgan,
Guy Mundlak, Anne Norton, Jennifer Orange, Umut Özsu, Gaetano Pentassuglia,
Kerry Rittich, Michel Rosenfeld, Brad Roth, András Sajó, Kim Scheppele, Brian
Tamanaha, Balázs Tóth, and Renata Uitz, as well as, of course, Michael Trebilcock,
for always advising to throw deep. Special thanks go to Patrick Healy, Courtney
Jung, Zoran Oklopcic, Arthur Ripstein, David Schneiderman, and the two anony-
mous reviewers at Oxford University Press, all of whom read the entire manuscript
with care and provided me with invaluable comments and advice. I am also grate-
ful to Evan Rosevear and especially Patrick Healy for their research assistance, and
Nancy Bueler for her exceptional administrative assistance. I would also like to
thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, for provid-
ing me with valuable research funding.
ix
x Acknowledgments
Parts of the book build on but significantly revise work previously published in
the International Journal of Constitutional Law, the London Journal of International
Law, the London Review of International Law, the McGill Law Journal, and the
Michigan International Law Journal, and I am grateful for their permission to use
this material. I would also like to thank Blake Ratcliff and Alden Domizio, both of
Oxford University Press, and Cassie Tuttle, Arun Kumar Vasu, and Enid L. Zafran
for skillfully shepherding the manuscript to publication.
I could not have completed this project without the enduring love I receive from
my family, especially my wonderful children, Riel, Sam, Serena, and Peter. But my
greatest debt is to Courtney Jung, my heart and soul mate, for filling my life with
love and purpose.
1
F IEL D M I S S IO N S
human rights are the vocabulary of justice for our globalizing world. They
frame our moral conceptions of obligations to friends and strangers, they shape our
political judgments about the nature and exercise of economic and political power,
and they help us distinguish legal acts from arbitrary violence and coercion. Human
rights frame the moral, shape the political, and distinguish the legal in places as local
and diverse as the family, the school, the workplace, the community, the nation, and
the State. But their true significance lies in their status as international legal entitle-
ments that call for radical revision of the ways in which international law organizes
global politics into an international legal order.
What it means to speak of human rights in this way is the subject of this book.
I offer a legal theory of human rights in international law that defines their nature
and purpose in terms of their capacity to monitor the structure and operation of
the international legal order. On this account, human rights require the interna-
tional legal order to attend to pathologies of its own making. They monitor the dis-
tribution and exercise of sovereign power to which international law extends legal
validity. They impose obligations on sovereign and other legal actors to exercise the
authority they receive from international law in ways that respect the rights of all.
They mobilize critical judgment on international law’s participation in the perpetu-
ation of global economic inequality. They generate international legal duties on all
of us to improve the social and economic conditions of impoverished people around
the world.
1
2 The Sovereignty of Human Rights
This way of speaking of international human rights law is a marked departure

from traditional accounts of its nature and purpose. Dominant moral accounts of
the field stipulate that its overarching mission is to protect essential and universal
features of what it means to be a human being from the exercise of sovereign power.
In addition to protecting essential features of our common humanity, however, inter-
national human rights law protects rights that attach to certain individuals and not
others, rights that create positive in addition to negative obligations, and rights that
obligate us to attend to the needs of strangers both at home and abroad. Minority
rights, indigenous rights, and, more broadly, the right of self-determination typi-
cally vest in some communities and not others for reasons that appear to be steeped
in contingencies of history and geography. Labor rights, social and economic rights,
and the right to development impose positive obligations on others to secure their
realization, make more sense in some national economies than others, and engage
with legal norms addressing colonization and economic globalization in ways that
moral accounts fail to grasp.
This book seeks to make sense of the rich variety of rights and instruments that
make up the field of international human rights law in ways that moral accounts
cannot. It ascribes a richer mission to the field by placing the legitimacy of the inter-
national legal order under its watch. It comprehends human rights in international
law as legal sites of moral and political contestation over fundamental questions that
relate to the structure and operation of international law, but it does so in distinc-
tively legal terms. The legal existence of international human rights is the product
not of moral insight but of the enactment of the various instruments that place
them on the international register, and their critical force rests in their capacity to
attend to some of the adverse effects of how we organize global politics into an inter-
national legal order.
This role is not divorced from the demands of morality. Determining why cer-
tain consequences merit criticism and others merit praise inevitably invites moral
judgment—and moral disagreement. But, unlike most moral conceptions, the legal
role of human rights, on the account offered here, is internal to the structure and
operation of international law. Even though, in moral theory, they may be formal
expressions of what we owe each other in ethical recognition of universal features of
what it means to be a human being, human rights play a different normative role in
international law. They express—imperfectly—what is required of the international
legal order to enable it to acquire a measure of normative legitimacy.
Readers familiar with these questions will recognize important affinities with
scholarship that emphasizes the role that human rights play in global politics.
Unlike most moral approaches, which focus on universal features of our common
humanity, political conceptions define the nature of human rights in terms of their
Field Missions 3
function in global political discourse. Human rights, according to political concep-

tions, are reasons that social, political, and legal actors rely on in international are-
nas to advocate interfering in the internal affairs of a State and to provide assistance
to States to promote their protection. Like political conceptions, this book links the
nature of international human rights to the function they perform in the broader
international arena.
Unlike political conceptions, however, the account offered here distinguishes
between global politics and international law. Human rights monitor the legitimacy
of political claims and actions to which the broader international legal order other-
wise extends international legal validity. Thus, while human rights act as political
reasons for international intervention and assistance in the practice of global poli-
tics, their international legal significance rests on their role as criteria for determin-
ing which of the countless claims and acts of power that constitute global politics
can assume a mantle of international legal legitimacy.
Human R ights as Mor al Concepts
Devoted to the protection and promotion of human rights deemed to possess inter-
national legal significance, international human rights law comprises a variety of
sources and instruments, including the United Nations Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, various international and regional treaties, principles of custom-
ary international law, and general principles of international law. Adopted and
proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948, the Universal
Declaration, as its title suggests, is universal in tone and aspiration, declaring that
“all members of the human family,” by virtue of their equal worth and dignity, share
certain fundamental human rights.1 These include rights to property, life, liberty
and security of the person; equal protection of the law; freedom of thought, opin-
ion, expression, religion, assembly, and association; rights to social security, educa-
tion, work, and an adequate standard of living; and rights of cultural membership
and political participation. Although the Universal Declaration technically is not
legally binding on States, its adoption marked the formal genesis of a profound
structural transformation of the international legal order. What was previously a
legal system almost exclusively devoted to providing legal form to relations between
and among sovereign States, international law began to lay claim to the power to
regulate relations between States and individuals and groups.
1
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, G.A. Res. 217A(III), U.N. Doc. A/RES/217(III) (Dec. 10, 1948).
This project gathered momentum when the U.N. Commission on Human

Rights proceeded to draft two treaties that eventually came into force in 1976: the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.2 Whereas the ICCPR commits
States to respect the right to life, the right to vote, freedom of conscience, speech,
religion, association, equal protection, and other civil and political freedoms, the
ICESCR enshrines rights to food, education, health, and shelter, as well as a host
of other social, economic, and cultural rights. These were followed by the adoption
of additional, more specialized human rights treaties addressing specific categories
of human rights, namely, the International Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Racial Discrimination, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms
of Discrimination Against Women, the Convention Against Torture and Other,
Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the Convention on the
Rights of the Child, and the Convention on Migrant Workers.3
Each of these treaties establishes a monitoring body charged with overseeing
State compliance.4 These treaty bodies provide specific comments on State reports
as well as general comments on the legal nature and scope of relevant treaty provi-
sions and coordinate their responsibilities with each other and other institutions,
such as the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Some, like the Human Rights
Committee, possess the authority to hear complaints brought by individuals alleg-
ing that their rights have been violated.5 Some are empowered to hear complaints by
one State that another State is in violation of its treaty obligations.6 Some, like the
2
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, U.N. Doc. A/6316 (1966), 999 U.N.T.S. 171 (entered
into force Mar. 23, 1976) (ICCPR); International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, U.N.
Doc. A/6316 (1966), 993 U.N.T.S. 3 (entered into force Jan. 3, 1976) (ICESCR).
3
International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, U.N. Doc. A6014
(1966), 660 U.N.T.S. 195 (entered into force Jan. 4, 1969); Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women, U.N. Doc. A/34/46 (1979), 1249 U.N.T.S. 14 (entered into force Sept. 3,
1981); Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment,
U.N. Doc. A/39/46 (1984), 1914 U.N.T.S. 519 (entered into force June 26, 1987); Convention on the Rights
of the Child (1989), 1577 U.N.T.S. 43 (entered into force Sept. 2, 1990); International Convention on the
Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (1990), U.N. Doc. A/45/49
(entered into force July 1, 2003).
4
For an assessment of the effectiveness of these treaty bodies, see James Crawford, The UN Human Rights
Treaty System: A System in Crisis?, in The Future of UN Human Rights Treaty Monitoring
(Philip Alston & James Crawford eds., 2000).
5
The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), the Committee Against Torture
(CAT), and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) also pos-
sess the power to hear individual complaints. This procedure applies only to States parties who have made a
declaration accepting the competence of the Committee in this regard.
6
CAT, the Committee on Migrant Workers (CMW), CERD, and the Human Rights Commission possess
this authority. CEDAW, CAT, and CMW also provide for disputes between States concerning interpreta-
tion or application of the Convention to be resolved in the first instance by negotiation or, failing that,
Field Missions 5
Committee against Torture, may, on their own initiative, initiate inquiries if they
have received reliable information about serious human rights violations.7
Paralleling the international proliferation of human rights instruments and insti-
tutions are similar developments at the regional level, with the adoption of both
general and specific human rights treaties in Europe, Africa, and the Americas,
and the establishment of institutions responsible for treaty oversight, elaboration,
and enforcement.8 Adding further to the complexity of the field is the domestic
legal significance of international and regional human rights commitments. Judges
around the world are borrowing relatively freely and with increasing regularity from
international, regional, and foreign sources to assist in their interpretive tasks.9 The
relation between the domestic and international legal spheres increasingly involves
“not merely the transmittal of the international, but a process of translation from
international to national” that possesses the capacity to “produce new meanings.”10
Despite the multiplicity of its constituent legal sources and instruments, the
dominant approach to the normative foundations of international human rights
law conceives of human rights as moral entitlements that all human beings possess
by virtue of our common humanity. What constitutes a human right, according
to this approach, is not determined by a positive legal instrument or institution.
Human rights exist prior to and independent of positive international human rights
law. Just because a legal order declares something to be a human right does not
make it so. Conversely, the fact that a human right does not receive international
legal protection does not mean that it is not a human right. The existence or non-
existence of a human right rests on abstract features of what it means to be human
by arbitration. One of the States involved may refer the dispute to the International Court of Justice if the
parties fail to agree to arbitration terms within six months. States may exclude themselves from this proce-
dure by making a declaration at the time of ratification or accession, in which case, in accordance with the
principle of reciprocity, they are barred from bringing cases against other States.
7
CERD also possesses this authority. Inquiries may only be undertaken with respect to States parties who
have recognized the competence of the relevant Committee in this regard.
8
Regional instruments include the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and
Fundamental Freedoms (1950), 213 U.N.T.S. 221 (entered into force Sept. 3, 1953); the American Convention
on Human Rights, OR OEA/Ser.L.V/II.82/Doc.6, rev.1 (1992); the Organization of African Unity (1963;
disbanded and replaced by the African Union, 2002); and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’
Rights (1981), AU Doc. CAB/LEG/67/3 rev.5, 21 I.L.M. 58 (entered into force Oct. 21, 1986).
9
See generally The Migration of Constitutional Ideas (Sujit Choudhry ed., 2006). See also
Christopher McCrudden, A Common Law of Human Rights? Transnational Judicial Conversations on
Constitutional Rights, 20 Oxford J. Legal Stud. 499, 501 (2000) (“[t]‌he phenomenon of borrowing
and transplantation from the international to national, from the national to international, from national
jurisdiction to national jurisdiction, is now commonplace”).
10
Karen Knop, Here and There: International Law in Domestic Courts, 32 N.Y.U. J. Int’l L. & Pol. 501, 506
(2000).
and the obligations to which these features give rise. The mission of the field is to
secure international legal protection of universal features of what it means to be a
human being.
Immanuel Kant wrote of a single, innate “right belonging to man by virtue of his
humanity” from which all other rights flow.11 Kant’s conception of rights sweeps
in much more of moral life than contemporary human rights law, but many con-
temporary moral accounts of human rights draw from the principle of universality
on which it rests. James Griffin, for example, conceives of human rights as protec-
tions of “personhood” and argues that they “must be universal, because they are pos-
sessed by human agents simply in virtue of their normative agency.”12 John Tasioulas
defines human rights as “moral entitlements possessed by all simply in virtue of
their humanity.”13 Similarly, John Simmonds argues that “human rights are rights
possessed by all human beings (at all times and in all places), simply in virtue of their
humanity.”14 In a somewhat different—but equally universal—vein, human rights,
according to Martha Nussbaum, protect “central human capabilities” that are fun-
damental to what it means to be truly human.15
On moral accounts such as these, human rights protect essential characteristics
or features that all of us share despite the innumerable historical, geographical,
cultural, communal, and other contingencies that shape our lives and our rela-
tions with others in unique ways. They give rise to specifiable duties that we all owe
each other in ethical recognition of what it means to be human. Rights and obli-
gations can also arise from the bonds of history, community, religion, culture, or
nation. But if such rights relate simply to contingent features of human existence,
they do not constitute human rights and do not merit a place on the international
legal register. And if we owe each other duties for reasons other than our common
humanity—say, because of friendship, kinship, or citizenship—then these duties
11
Immanuel Kant, The Doctrine of Right, Part I of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy
6:237 (Mary Gregor trans. & ed., 1996). For discussion, see Arthur Ripstein, Force and
Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy 30–56 (2009).
12
James Griffin, On Human Rights 48 (2008).
13
John Tasioulas, The Moral Reality of Human Rights, in Freedom from Poverty as a Human
Right: Who Owes What to the Very Poor? 76 (Thomas Pogge ed., 2007), 75–101 at 76 (emphasis
deleted).
14
A. John Simmonds, Justification and Legitimacy: Essays on Rights and Obligation 185
(2001) (emphasis omitted); Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice
18 (2d ed., 2003) (“[h]‌uman rights are, literally, the rights that one has simply because one is a human
being”); see also Alan Gewirth, Human Rights (1982).
15
Initially, Nussbaum distinguished between capabilities and rights. See Martha Nussbaum, Woman
and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (2000). She subsequently defended the
capabilities approach as a species of a human rights approach. See Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of
Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (2006).
Field Missions 7
do not correspond to human rights and should not be identified as such by interna-
tional legal instruments.
Distinguishing between obligations that correspond to human rights and those
that reflect special bonds of solidarity echoes a distinction more formally drawn by
H.L.A. Hart between general and special rights. For Hart, general rights are “rights
which all men capable of choice have,” whereas special rights are “rights that arise
out of special transactions between individuals or out of some special relationship in
which they stand to each other.”16 Although Hart did not specifically equate general
rights with human rights, he believed that some rights are general in nature because
they vest in men “qua men and not only if they are members of some society or stand
in some special relation to each other.”17 Special rights, in contrast, arise from par-
ticular relationships that we have with others, whether voluntarily, as in contract, or
by virtue of belonging to a particular social or political community. General rights
impose obligations on “everyone,” whereas special rights impose obligations only on
“parties to the special transaction or relationship.”18
Moral accounts treat human rights as general rights.19 They arise from the fact of
humanity, they can be claimed by all, and they impose obligations on all. Human
rights are not special rights. They do not reflect special bonds that exist among mem-
bers of particular communities, they do not vest in some people and not others, and
they do not require us to be partial to some at the expense of others. To speak of an
entitlement as a human right must mean something other than what justice requires
in the context of contingent relationships in which we find ourselves. It must be an
entitlement grounded in a universal feature of what it means to be human, regard-
less of the diverse circumstances that define our places in the world.
With the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights
and other international and regional instruments, international human rights
law includes what are often referred to as second- and third-generation rights.20
Second-generation social and economic rights guarantee individuals access to a
set of basic social resources, such as food, housing, an adequate standard of living,
16
H.L.A. Hart, Are There any Natural Rights?, 64 Phil. Rev. 175, 188, 183 (1955).
17
Id. at 175.
18
Id. at 183.
19
Charles Beitz also makes this connection. See Charles Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights 68 (2009).
20
First-generation rights typically refer to civil and political rights, second-generation rights typically refer
to social, economic, and cultural rights, and third-generation rights include the right to development,
the right to self-determination, and a right to a healthy environment. For their initial iteration, see Karel
Vasak, Human Rights: A Thirty-Year Struggle: the Sustained Efforts to Give Force of Law to the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, 30 UNESCO Courier 11 (Paris: U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization, November 1977).
healthcare, and education.21 It conceives of these rights as imposing obligations on

States to take measures to secure their protection.22 But social and economic rights
and the obligations that accompany them fit awkwardly into moral conceptions of
human rights. Basic needs, such as food and shelter, are essential features of what it
means to be human. To take from someone something essential to one’s existence
is a human rights violation. It is a matter of deep controversy, however, whether
the set of duties that we owe each other directly in moral recognition of our com-
mon humanity includes positive obligations to assist others in need. While moral
accounts easily generate negative obligations of noninterference, they do not easily
generate universal and specifiable obligations of assistance. What positive obliga-
tions accompany the right to food, for example, and who bears these obligations?
International human rights instruments also extend protection to labor rights
and what is referred to as a third-generation right to development. These rights,
too, can be understood in terms that are consistent with moral accounts of human
rights as protecting universal interests. Labor rights are often said to be specific
entitlements that attach to workers by virtue of a more general right to freedom of
association that vests in all of us. The right to development speaks to the universal
aspiration that all individuals are free to develop, flourish, and live their lives to the
fullest. But these rights also typically impose positive obligations on others to secure
their realization, make more sense in some national economies than others, and pro-
tect some individuals and not others, and they are tied to the international legality
of processes of economic and social globalization in ways that moral accounts fail
to grasp.
This has led some moral theorists to claim that second- and third-generation
rights that entail positive obligations are not human rights at all. While such posi-
tive obligations can be specified in law, their specification is conditional on political
and legal institutions and not on a pre-institutional conception of the obligations
we owe each other by virtue of being human. In the name of social justice, a politi-
cal community may opt to entrench domestic rights protecting the welfare of its
members by imposing positive obligations on State actors and institutions to pro-
vide, say, food to those in need—and on individuals to contribute to the cost of
such a benefit. In the absence of such allocation of obligations, however, we cannot
identify inaction that would violate one’s right to food. Nor can we identify which
actors might be required to fulfill a right to food. A human right, such as a right
21
Adopted Dec. 16, 1966, 993 U.N.T.S. 3 (entered into force Jan. 3, 1976), arts. 11 (food, housing, adequate
standard of living), 12 (health), 13 (education).
22
Id. at art. 2. See also General Comment No. 3 in Report of the Fifth Session, U.N. ESCOR, 5th Sess., Supp.
No. 3, Annex 3, U.N. Doc. E/1991/23. E/C.12/1990/8 (1990).
Field Missions 9
to life, may entail positive obligations to secure its protection, but such secondary
obligations flow from a primary obligation that attaches to all of us not to infringe
this right.23
This is not to say that moral theorists have not addressed this challenge. Griffin
argues that human rights provide “at least the minimum provision of resources and
capabilities” necessary to be a human agent. He does so by drawing a distinction
between general and particular obligations. For Griffin, we all bear obligations to
assist others in distress, but who bears these obligations in particular instances—and
what they amount to—rest on a host of contingencies such as which person or insti-
tution is in the best position and best able to act. They are also shaped by competing
considerations that arise from deep commitments that form our moral identities,
such as commitments to one’s own family and community.24 Tasioulas has sug-
gested that human rights enjoy a “temporally constrained form of universality,”
which permits features of the social world that we inhabit to play a role in deter-
mining their existence.25 Tasioulas also takes issue with the requirement that cor-
relative duties must be universal in nature. In his view, the existence of a human
right is conditional only on it being grounded in an interest we all share as humans
“significant enough to generate duties on the part of others,” such as freedom from
poverty.26 But meeting this challenge—whether by distinguishing between general
and particular obligations, conceptualizing universal claims in temporal terms, or
accepting the contingency of duties—requires relaxing the properties of universal-
ity on which moral conceptions of human rights typically rest their case.
This challenge is compounded when a human right is said to impose duties on
individuals and collectivities in political communities other than where the bearers
of rights are located. If A has a right to x, then B has a duty not to interfere with A’s
enjoyment of right x. A’s right to x, however, does not typically obligate B to give x
to A, especially if A and B are citizens of different States. Again, this is not to say
that moral theorists have not addressed this challenge. Griffin, for example, writes
that “if poor central governments are unable to shoulder the burden” of poverty
within their midst, “then perhaps the time has come for us to consider whether
23
See, e.g., Onara O’Neill, The Dark Side of Human Rights, 81 Int’l Aff. 427 (2005). See also Carl
Wellman, Welfare Rights 181 (1982).
24
Griffin, supra note 12, at 96–110. Compare Pablo Gilabert, Humanist and Political Perspectives on Human
Rights, 39 Pol. Theory 439, 443 (2011) (distinguishing between “abstract rights concerned with extremely
important interests shared by all” and “specific rights” that “identify the protection that the basic interests
deserve in certain historical circumstances.”).
25
Tasioulas, supra note 13, at 76.
26
Id. at 77.
the burden should not also be placed on a group of wealthy nations.”27 But the fact
remains: moral conceptions of human rights grounded in universality struggle with
rights that impose positive obligations on States to provide benefits to their own
citizens and on citizens to contribute to their cost. They struggle even more with
rights whose external dimensions mandate international redistributive measures to
address global poverty.28
Moral accounts of human rights cast in universal terms also struggle with inter-
national human rights that extend legal protection to certain individuals and groups
but not others. Several States have entered into bilateral treaties protecting the
rights of minorities living outside of the State in which they share a historical affili-
ation.29 Some multilateral treaties also extend rights protection to various minor-
ity communities.30 Minority rights are sometimes portrayed as protecting religious,
cultural, and linguistic affiliations that are essential features of what it means to be
a human being. Although worded in universal terms, numerous international civil
and political rights also can be and have been interpreted to protect the interests of
specific religious, ethnic, and cultural communities.31
In addition, recent developments at the regional and international levels sig-
nal a renewed commitment to rights that protect indigenous territories, cultures,
and forms of governance from assimilative forces emanating from States in which
27
Griffin, supra note 12, at 104. Griffin adds that “a lot of work would have to go into deciding which
nations count as ‘rich’ for this purpose, how great a demand can be made of them, and what a fair distribu-
tion of the burden would be.” Id.
28
But see Philip Alston & Gerard Quinn, The Nature and Scope of States Parties’ Obligations under the
International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, 9 Hum. Rts. Q. 156 (1987) (the ICESCR
gives rise to a duty on rich States to assist poor States when poor States do not have resources necessary to
fulfill their obligations under the ICESCR to their citizens).
29
Poland has entered into treaties with the Federal Republic of Germany (1991), the Czech and Slovak
Republic (1991), the Russian Federation (1992), Belarus (1992), and Lithuania (1994). In the 1990s, Hungary
entered into treaties with Ukraine, Slovenia, Croatia, Slovakia, and Romania. In addition to its treaty with
Hungary, Romania has entered into treaties with Ukraine and Moldova. Other examples include treaties
between Croatia and Hungary and Italy. See generally Protection of Minority Rights Through
Bilateral Treaties: The Case of Central and Eastern Europe (Arie Bloed & Pieter van Dijk
eds., 1999).
30
Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, for instance, extends protection
to ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities. For a review of the Human Rights Committee’s views on
article 27, see Gaetano Pentassuglia, Minorities in International Law: A Comparative
Perspective (2002).
31
See, e.g., Francis Hopu and Tepoaitu Bessert v. France (Communication no. 549/193), Views of the Human
Rights Committee, UN Doc. CCPR/C/60/D/549/1993, 217–222 (July 29, 1997) (defining art. 23 of the
ICCPR, which enshrines the right to a family life by reference to indigenous cultural traditions); Awas
Tingni v. Rep. of Nicaragua, Inter-Am. Comm’n H.R., Petition No. 11 577 (2001) (defining art. 21 of the
American Convention on Human Rights, which enshrines the right to property, as protecting indigenous
title).
Field Missions 11
indigenous peoples are located.32 Indigenous rights can be understood as specific

instantiations of more general rights that inhere in all of us, such as the right of
self-determination, but which are tailored to the unique circumstances of indige-
nous peoples.33 The right of self-determination is often said to vest in all individuals
and in all peoples and, to this extent, possesses universal value. But minority rights,
indigenous rights, and, more generally, the right of self-determination typically vest
in some individuals and communities and not in others, for reasons that have less
to do with universal norms and more to do with contingencies of history and geog-
raphy that form the backdrop of the international legal order. Moreover, minority
rights, indigenous rights, and the right of self-determination possess the capacity to
divide people into different communities, create insiders and outsiders, pit ethnic-
ity against ethnicity, and threaten the universal aspirations that inform dominant
moral conceptions of the field.
The commitment to universalism in moral accounts also sheds light on the prac-
tice of privileging certain human rights at the expense of others. Since the inception
of contemporary international human rights law, many State and non-State actors
have tended to privilege interests that underlie international civil and political
rights at the expense of second- and third-generation rights, notwithstanding asser-
tions of a principle of indivisibility that holds all human rights to be interdependent
and of equal value.34 Governments are more likely to entrench civil and political
rights than social and economic rights in their constitutions and less likely to agree
to individual redress measures at the international level.35 The prominence that civil
and political rights enjoy in international human rights law is in no small measure
due to the fact that most of the field’s foundational instruments and institutions
came into existence in the wake of wartime atrocities and were consciously designed
to protect interests associated with civil and political freedom from the raw exercise
of collective State power.
32
See, e.g., Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, A/RES/61/295 Ann. 1 (Sept. 13, 2007).
33
See S. James Anaya, Indigenous Peoples in International Law (2d ed. 2004) for an account of
international indigenous rights in these terms.
34
See, e.g., art. 5 of the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, UN A/CONF.157/23 (adopted by
World Conference on Human Rights, June 25, 1993) (declaring that “[a]‌ll human rights are universal,
indivisible and interdependent and interrelated”). For an extensive treatment of the topic, see Daniel
J. Whelan, Indivisible Human Rights: A History (2010).
35
Until recently, there was no Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and
Cultural Rights akin to that which accompanies the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,
for example, enabling individuals to file petitions to the Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural
Rights. The new Optional Protocol to the ICESCR opened for signature and Ratification in September
2009. It came into force on May 5, 2013. As of this writing, forty-five States are signatories to, and only three
States have ratified, the Optional Protocol.
But this prominence is also a function of the influence of universalism in norma-

tive debates about the nature of this field of law. If human rights correspond to only
those duties that we owe each other directly in moral recognition of what it means to
be human, then second- and third-generation rights, like civil and political rights, may
well obligate individuals to not interfere with the liberty or autonomy of others. But
whether they impose positive obligations to assist others in need, especially others who
belong to different political communities or other communities of value, is a matter of
deep controversy from the perspective of a universal account. As a result, human rights
that require positive State action to secure their protection, especially those that impose
duties on individuals and collectivities in political communities other than where the
bearers of rights are located, fit awkwardly within the universal picture.
Critics often charge that universal accounts of human rights fail to grasp that at
least some moral standards are relative to specific cultural and historical contexts
and that there are no universal means of judging the merits of culturally specific
ways of life. Cultural relativists argue that universalism masks the imposition of cul-
turally specific beliefs on communities that possess different inner logics,36 whereas
universalists charge that relativists authorize violations of human rights in the name
of cultural difference. Debates between universalism and relativism have long domi-
nated moral inquiries into the nature of international human rights law.37 And so
36
Cultural relativism is often broken down into a number of different versions. A common list includes descrip-
tive relativism, normative relativism, and meta-ethical relativism. Descriptive relativism is factual in nature: it
points out that as a matter of fact, different moral beliefs exist by virtue of differing cultural contexts. For refine-
ments of this version, see Melford Spiro, Cultural Relativism and the Future of Anthropology, 1 Cultural
Anthropology 259, 260–61 (1986). Normative relativism is based on the more contentious claim that differ-
ing moral values have no validity outside of their particular cultural contexts and, as such, are incommensurable.
The work of Ruth Benedict is often associated with this view. See Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture
278 (1934) (there are “coexisting and equally valid patterns of life”). Meta-ethical relativism holds that one can-
not objectively justify the moral beliefs of one culture over the moral beliefs of another, although there may
exist certain shared or universal values. See generally Douglas Lee Donoho, Relativism Versus Universalism
in Human Rights: The Search for Meaningful Standards, 27 Stan. J. Int’l L. 345, 351–52 (1991); William
K. Frankena, Ethics 109–10 (1973); Paul F. Schmidt, Some Criticisms of Cultural Relativism, 70 J. Phil. 780
(1955). For an insightful critique of relativism, see Steven Lukes, Moral Relativism (2008).
37
The debate began in earnest in 1947 when the Executive Board of the American Anthropological
Association fired a salvo at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights during the drafting of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, claiming that “standards and values are relative to the culture from which
they derive so that any attempt to formulate postulates that grow out of the beliefs or moral codes of one
culture must to that extent detract from the applicability of any Declaration of Human Rights to mankind
as a whole.” Executive Board, American Anthropological Association, Statement on Human Rights, 49
Am. Anthropologist 539 (1947). It resurfaced in the context of a debate over collective “Asian values”
that are said to deviate from individualistic understandings of human rights. See Anthony J. Langlois,
The Politics of Justice and Human Rights: Southeast Asia and Universalist Theory
(2001). It has assumed a new guise in the context of an initiative primarily by Russia to ground international
human rights norms in “traditional values.” For an illuminating account, see Christopher McCrudden,
Field Missions 13
they should—assuming, as they do, that the mission of the field is to protect universal
features of what it means to be a human being.
The significance of these debates turns precisely on the validity of this assump-
tion. If the nature of the field is not what the standard account valorizes or what
relativists criticize, then its traditional supporters and detractors are locked in
a disagreement—one that does not appear to be resolvable in either the near or
distant future—that has little to do with the actual object of their attention. An
account of the normative architecture of the field should not conflate fact and norm
by equating legal validity with moral legitimacy, but nor should it lose sight of the
object that it seeks to describe. If human rights in international law are not those
that moral theory generates, then moral accounts of human rights are not normative
accounts of international human rights law. In the words of two critics, moral theo-
rists “have concentrated on disputes over which rights should appear on the legal
list, with little or no attention paid to what being on the list actually means.”38 The
drawback is not simply a loose grasp of the law. The true cost is a shrinking of the
field’s capacity to engage fundamental normative questions relating to the structure
and operation of the international legal order.
Human R ights as Political Concepts
In recent years, political accounts of international human rights have garnered

attention in international political theory. Unlike most moral approaches, which
focus on universal features of our common humanity, political conceptions define
the nature of human rights in terms of their function in global political discourse.
Human rights, according to political conceptions, do not necessarily correlate to the
requirements of moral theory. They represent reasons that social, political, and legal
actors rely on in international arenas to advocate interfering in the internal affairs of
a State and to provide assistance to States to promote their protection.39
Human Rights, Southern Voices, and “Traditional Values” at the United Nations (2014) (unpublished
paper on file with author). For an overview of the universalism-relativism debate, see Alison Dundes
Renteln, International Human Rights: Universalism versus Relativism (1990).
38
Saladin Meckled-Garcia & Başak Çali, Lost in Translation: The Human Rights Ideal and International
Human Rights Law, in The Legalization of Human Rights: Multi-Disciplinary
Perspectives on Human Rights and Human Rights Law 11 (Başak Çali & Saladin
Meckled-García eds., 2006).
39
See generally Joseph Raz, Human Rights without Foundations, in The Philosophy of International
Law (Samantha Besson & John Tasioulas eds., 2010); Beitz, supra note 19; Kenneth Baynes, Toward
a Political Conception of Human Rights, 35 Phil. & Soc. Criticism 371 (2009); Andrea Sangiovanni,
Justice and the Priority of Politics to Morality, 16 J. Pol. Phil. 137 (2008); Joshua Cohen, Minimalism about
Charles Beitz, for example, argues that justifications of human rights, as well as
questions relating to their content and the obligations they impose on others, pre-
suppose a concept of human rights that specifies the properties that make human
rights what they are. Such a concept will not justify their protection nor determine
their content or their ensuing obligations, but it will provide some purchase and
help to frame debate on these questions. Beitz offers a concept of human rights
derived from the practice of human rights in global politics. Global human rights
practice, for Beitz, is a social practice where participants invoke or rely on human
rights as reasons for certain kinds of actions in certain circumstances.
What this practice reveals is that human rights protect urgent individual inter-
ests against certain predictable dangers associated with the exercise of sovereign
power. States have a primary obligation to protect urgent interests of individuals
over whom they exercise sovereign power, but external actors, such as other States
and international institutions, have secondary obligations to secure protection
when a State fails to live up to its responsibility.40 “To say something is a human
right,” in Beitz’s view, “is to say that social institutions that fail to protect the right
are defective—they fall short of meeting conditions that anyone would reasonably
expect them to satisfy—and that international efforts to aid or promote reform are
legitimate and in some cases may be morally required.”41
Political conceptions of human rights that focus on practice require attributing
significance to the intentions of political actors producing and reproducing the
practice at hand. A political conception gives credence to the intent of participants
in the practice of human rights because it identifies the nature of human rights by
reference to the actions of those involved in the practices that exemplify their discur-
sive role in global politics. Ascribing meaning to such actions requires determina-
tions of the intentions, aims, and objectives of those who engage in them. A political
conception, in other words, attributes relevance to the intent of participants in the
practice of human rights because the meaning of an action cannot be gleaned with-
out a grasp of the intent behind it. The nature of the human rights that comprise the
Human Rights: The Most We Can Hope For?, 12 J. Pol. Phil. 190 (2004); John Rawls, The Law of
Peoples (1999).
40
Beitz, supra note 19, at 102–17. Rawls also defines the functional role of international human rights in
terms of justifying interference in the internal affairs of a State. See Rawls, supra note 39, at 79 (human
rights restrict “the justifying reasons for war and its conduct” and specify “limits of a regime’s internal
autonomy”). But as Beitz points out, Rawls does not also see human rights as justifying external assis-
tance in their realization. Beitz, in contrast, includes external assistance in his definition of the functional
role of human rights, which leads him to define the right to an adequate standard of living as mandating
global wealth redistribution. See Charles Beitz, Human Rights and the Law of Peoples, in The Ethics of
Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy 196 (D.K. Chatterjee, ed., 2004).
41
Id. at 210.
Field Missions 15
field, according to this perspective, rests in no small measure on what political actors
intend to accomplish when they engage in the practice of human rights.
Beitz reveals his reliance on the intent of participants in his critique of conceptions
of human rights that rely on the natural law tradition to specify their nature. Beitz
notes correctly that those responsible for the creation of contemporary international
human rights instruments and institutions explicitly ruled out natural law as a single
conceptual framework for comprehending their international legal status.42 The draft-
ers of the Universal Declaration, for instance, comprehended human rights as public
principles that participants in the global practice of human rights rely on to criticize
the exercise of sovereign power, not as legal entitlements that individuals possess by
virtue of their human nature. While the global practice of human rights manifested
a natural law perspective in some quarters, it also manifested different perspectives in
other quarters, and the framers of the Universal Declaration, Beitz observes, conceived
of this practice as manifesting a “public doctrine open to a variety of justifications.”43
As Beitz’s account of the formation of the Universal Declaration reveals, a focus on
the original intent of those responsible for promulgating international human rights
instruments assists in distinguishing political conceptions of human rights from
moral accounts that seek to locate their nature in essential properties of what it means
to be human. But although reliance on originalism might bolster the plausibility of
political accounts in the eyes of those otherwise tempted by the allure of natural law,
it exposes what such accounts must repress to acquire explanatory power. Divining
the intent of those responsible for the enactment of a legal norm is a thoroughly inter-
pretive enterprise that must specify a plausible method of discerning intent, distin-
guish actual intentions from stated intentions, identify which actors count as framers,
assume that each actor was motivated by a single objective or assign weights to her
multiple objectives, specify how much weight is to be given to their intentions in rela-
tion to the intentions of those whom they represent, and sift through countless, com-
peting political motivations of a multiplicity of international actors.44
42
Beitz, supra note 19, at 20–21.
43
Id. at 21. This led Jacques Maritain, a Catholic philosopher active in the drafting of the U.N. Declaration
while serving as France’s ambassador to the Vatican, to famously report a colleague’s comment about the
Declaration that “we agree about the rights but on condition that no one asks us why.” Jacques Maritain,
Introduction, in Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations 10 (UNESCO ed., 1949).
44
One way to address some of these concerns is to narrow the class of political actors whose practice defines
a human right. Jean Cohen, for example, focuses on “the politics of actors who invoke the international
documents and rely on strong moral arguments when declaring and claiming their own rights vis-à-vis the
exercise of the public power first and foremost of their own state.” Jean L. Cohen, Globalization
and Sovereignty: Rethinking Legality, Legitimacy, and Constitutionalism 164 (2012)
(emphasis in original). This enables Cohen to box out the politics of actors who invoke the discourse of
human rights in the context of “the enforcement model that humanitarian intervention articulates
Putting aside challenges associated with relying on originalism in international

law, if the goal is to specify the political role that human rights play in the interna-
tional legal order as a descriptive matter, then it makes eminent sense to attend to
how they motivate and justify the actions of political actors in the international
arena. But relying on practice to identify the normative dimensions of human
rights—that is, the role they should play in the international arena—risks conflat-
ing fact and norm and potentially drains human rights of their capacity to act as
instruments of critique of existing practices. Determining the extent to which a
human right should act in this way requires accounting for its normative purpose,
and it makes little sense to locate such an account in existing practice.
Moral theorists generally do not confront this challenge to the extent they affirm
that universalism grounds the normativity of human rights and hold existing
practice to account to the extent that it fails to respect what human rights require
as a matter of abstract morality.45 But, as we have seen, they face this problem in
reverse: the legal regime they imagine in normative terms becomes the legal regime
that, they insist, must exist in fact. If a political account seeks to offer a prescriptive
as well as a descriptive explanation of human rights, however, it needs to explain
why the particular discursive role a human right plays in motivating and justifying
political action explains its normative value.46
Political conceptions of human rights rarely rest on crude versions of convention-
alism, where what we do has normative value simply because we do it.47 Beitz, for
example, is certainly aware of the challenges that political accounts of human rights
face when moving from the descriptive to the prescriptive plane. One challenge
relates to how we determine whether the purposes associated with human rights
are sufficiently important objectives of “global political life to justify imposing
regarding grave humanitarian crises or grave rights violations” from “the heart of the international human
rights ‘regime.’ ” Id. at 194. For an illuminating account of international human rights that derives their
normativity from the practices of feminist human rights activists “working to make marginalized peo-
ples and marginalized structures visible,” see Brooke A. Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a
World of Difference (2008). For a critique of various methods of identifying the practice of human
rights and its practitioners and a proposal that one needs to construct an “idealized practitioner” for this
task, see David Jason Karp, The Location of International Practices: What Is Human Rights Practice?, 39
Rev. Int’l Stud. 969 (2013).
45
It should be noted that Griffin argues that practice (in his words, “the human rights tradition”) is consis-
tent with and therefore supports conceiving of human rights in universal terms. Griffin, supra note 12,
at 30–32.
46
Compare Laura Valentini, Human Rights, Freedom, and Political Authority, 40 Pol. Theory 573,
577 (2012) (“Why should the function human rights actually play in contemporary politics shape their
meaning?”).
47
For a defense of moral relativism grounded in conventionalism, see Gilbert Harman, Moral Relativism, in
Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity (G. Harman & J.J. Thompson, eds., 1996).
Field Missions 17
costs on those agents whose contributions the practice claims to exist.”48 A second
is how to generate “selection criteria for the substantive requirements of human
rights.”49 Beitz’s elegant solution is to defend a set of conditions that practices must
meet before determining that their purposes are sufficiently important objectives of
global political life to attract the normative value we attach to human rights.50
Other scholars conceive of selection criteria required of political conceptions of
human rights in different terms. Joseph Raz argues that such criteria must be empir-
ical and variable, resting on whether, under the circumstances, external interference
in the domestic affairs of a State is normatively justifiable, which in turn rests on
contingencies specific to the State in question and the current nature of the interna-
tional legal order.51 Joshua Cohen argues that human rights, properly understood,
are those that relate to “an idea of membership or inclusion in an organized political
society, and not on a deeper outlook about the proper conduct of a good or righteous
life.”52 Michael Ignatieff offers a minimalist account of human rights, validating
practices of intervention in the name of those human rights that relate to “the ele-
mental priority of all human rights activism: to stop torture, beatings, killings, rape
and assault to improve, as best we can, the security of ordinary people.”53 Selection
criteria such as these provide political conceptions with critical distance from posi-
tive international law. But if one’s selection criteria generate a list of human rights
that is narrower than those that exist in international law, then political accounts,
like their moral counterparts, are not normative accounts of international human
rights law. They are normative critiques of international human rights law.
More fundamentally, whether these solutions are adequate to the task at hand is
less important than what they assume, which is that the task at hand is to ascertain
48
Beitz, supra note 19, at 126.
49
Id., where Beitz also identifies the challenge of determining in whom obligations associated with human
rights ought to vest.
50
According to Beitz (id. at 137), an argument for a justifying claim about “the content of human rights doc-
trine” should make good three contentions:
1. That the interest to be protected by the right is sufficiently important when reasonably regarded
from the perspective of those to be protected such that it would be reasonable to consider its
protection to be a political priority.
2. That it would be advantageous to protect the underlying interest by means of legal or policy
instruments available to the State.
3. That in the central range of cases in which a State might fail to provide the protection, the failure
would be a suitable object of international concern.
51
Raz, supra note 39, at 186.
52
Joshua Cohen, Is There a Human Right to Democracy?, in The Egalitarian Conscience: Essays in
Honour of G.A. Cohen 237 (Christine Sypnowich, ed., 2006) (emphasis omitted).
53
Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry 173 (2001).
the normative dimensions of the discursive practice of human rights. This may well
be the case if the nature of the inquiry is to determine the normative properties of
the role that human rights play in global politics. But if the task is instead to deter-
mine the normative properties of human rights in international law, then what is at
stake is the normativity of laws that require or authorize actions we associate with
the practice of human rights, not the normativity of actions that these laws require
or authorize. Whereas a political account focuses on the role that human rights play
in global politics, a legal account focuses on the normative role that they play in the
structure and operation of international law.
Human R ights as Legal Concepts
Understanding international human rights as legal concepts starts with the prem-
ise that international law, not moral theory or political practice, determines their
existence.54 An international human right to food, for example, exists because the
International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights enshrines such
a right.55 Its international legal status as a human right derives from the fact that
international law, according to the principle pacta sunt servanda, provides that a
treaty in force between two or more sovereign States is binding upon the parties
to it and must be performed by them in good faith.56 Similarly, the right to devel-
opment is a human right in international law because the U.N. General Assembly
has declared its legal existence.57 The international legal validity of a norm—what
makes it part of international law—rests on a relatively straightforward exercise in
legal positivism: a norm possesses international legal validity if its enactment, prom-
ulgation, or specification is in accordance with more general rules that international
law lays down for the creation of specific legal rights and obligations.58
54
Allen Buchanan puts it this way: legal rights “are what they are: legal rights; and legal rights need not be
embodiments of corresponding moral rights.” Allen Buchanan, The Heart of Human Rights 11
(2013) (emphasis omitted).
55
ICESCR, supra note 2, art. 11.
56
Art. 26, Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, opened for signature May 23, 1969, 1155 U.N.T.S. 331
(entered into force Jan. 27, 1980).
57
See, e.g., Richard Bilder, Rethinking International Human Rights: Some Basic Questions, [1969] Wisc.
L. Rev. 171, 173 (“in practice a claim is an international human right if the United Nations General
Assembly says it is”). The authority of the General Assembly to proclaim human rights, according to Philip
Alston, is derived from the terms of the U.N. Charter. See Philip Alston, Conjuring Up New Human
Rights: A Proposal for Quality Control, 78 Am. J. Int’l Law 607 (1984).
58
For classic articulations of legal positivism, see John L. Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence
Determined (Wilfred E. Rumble ed., 1995) (a law is valid because it is the command of a sovereign);
Hans Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State (Anders Wedberg trans., 1999) (a legal norm is
Field Missions 19
International legal theory is intimately familiar with the positivist claim that the
validity of a law rests on its formal compliance with the rules surrounding the for-
mation of law of its host legal system. Understood in positivist terms, international
law is a body of norms that governs international actors that the field recognizes as
possessing international legal personality, and the legal validity of these norms does
not rest on the extent to which they secure or promote justice or morality. Whether
international law requires a State to act or abstain from acting in a particular way
turns on whether the requirement in question is in accordance with, or is autho-
rized by, the rules that international law establishes for the creation of legal rights
and obligations and the regulation of power.
In contrast, justice is a matter of ethics or morality. Justice may require much of
international law. It may require the field to prohibit war when it authorizes it, or
authorize war when it prohibits it. It may mandate open borders to allow individu-
als, families, even whole communities, to relocate to other parts of the world even
though international law authorizes States to build legal—and actual—barriers
around their borders. It may demand wealthy States to share their wealth and
resources with those lacking in both. But what justice or morality demands is not
necessarily the law. The international legal validity of a norm rests on compliance
with more general norms governing the legality of its enactment, promulgation, or
specification.
The history of international legal thought is punctuated by spectacular efforts to
establish a measure of autonomy for the field from raw claims of morality and power.59
Perhaps the most ambitious is Hans Kelsen’s “pure theory of law,” which epitomizes
a positivist conception of international law.60 Kelsen distinguishes between moral
norms, which are typically derived from general moral principles, and legal norms,
which are the product of an act of will. According to Kelsen, an act of will cre-
ates law only if it is authorized by a “higher” legal norm. For Kelsen, the legality of
domestic law—at least from the perspective of international law—ultimately rests
valid if authorized by another legal norm of a higher rank); and H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law
(1961) (a law is valid if it conforms with “secondary rules” or laws that authorize the enactment of a law).
Some have drawn a distinction between political and analytic positivism, the former an interpretive strat-
egy and the latter an objective description. See Ronald Dworkin, Justice in Robes 26–33 (2006). For
a defense of political positivism in international law, see Benedict Kingsbury, Legal Positivism as Normative
Politics: International Society, Balance of Power and Lassa Oppenheim’s Positive International Law, 13 Eur.
J. Int’l L. 401 (2002).
59
See Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of
International Law 1870–1960 (2001).
60
Hans Kelsen, Introduction to Problems of Legal Theory (Bonnie Litschewski Paulson &
Stanley L. Paulson trans., 1992).
on international legal norms, which validates claims by States of sovereign authority

over territory and persons.
That scholars like Kelsen sought to establish a measure of autonomy for interna-
tional law from claims of morality and justice is no surprise. The norms on which
the field confers legal validity are produced, in multiple sites, by ambiguous cus-
tomary practices and shifting coalitions of the very same legal actors—States—that
they regulate. Moreover, there is no overarching judicial institution that regularly
provides authoritative guidance on what the field requires of States in the context of
particular disputes. Since the very inception of the field, States have sought to define
international law by invoking broad claims of justice or morality to provide a legal
veneer to self-interested international political aspirations. Separating international
law from justice or morality is not simply an intellectual challenge. It is a task that
international lawyers and scholars have seen as critical to the capacity of interna-
tional law to provide legal order to global politics.
Conceiving of an international human right’s legal existence in positivistic terms
is not to downplay the politics behind its legal production. Human rights in inter-
national law are legal outcomes of deep political contestation over the international
legal validity of the exercise of certain forms of power. For those in whom human
rights vest, seeking international legal validity “entails wresting the power to par-
ticipate in the politically relevant discussion and decisions regarding who should
be accorded which rights, whose voices should be heard, what rights people have,
how they should be interpreted, and about how public power should be exercised.”61
Such contestation does not cease upon the enactment of an international instru-
ment that enshrines a human right in international law. Contestation continues
over its nature and scope in particular contexts as diverse as individual or collective
disputes requiring international legal resolution, opinions offered by international
legal actors on State compliance with treaty obligations, juridical determinations of
the boundaries between domestic and international legal spheres, and negotiations
among State actors that yield binding or nonbinding specifications of international
legal obligations. Once transformed from political claim into legal right, and sub-
sequently as a result of interpretive acts that elaborate their nature and purpose,
human rights in turn empower new political projects based on the rules they estab-
lish to govern the distribution and exercise of power.
Contestation continues in part because the legal existence of an international
human right underdetermines its content. The interests that a human right pro-
tects, the nature of the obligations to which it gives rise, the actors who bear these
61
Cohen, supra note 44, at 170.
Field Missions 21
obligations—these and other questions typically remain open to legal interpreta-

tion. Various interpretive sources assist in resolving questions surrounding the con-
tent of an international human right, including the intent of those who participated
in the politics that led to its legal existence.62 But unless one is a strict proponent of
original intent, the content of an international human right is not determined by
the politics of its legal production. Textual considerations also play a role in deter-
mining the content of an international human right.63 Occasionally, a legal instru-
ment in which a human right is enshrined sets out relatively clearly, for example,
what obligations it entails and on whom they fall. The practice of legal and political
actors seeking to implement a human right in a variety of institutional contexts also
helps to answer questions about its content.
Like political conceptions, the legal account offered here finds practices surround-
ing a human right useful. However, practice is not, as political theorists might pro-
pose, the source of a right’s normative significance in international law. Practice is
relevant in illuminating a right’s content. Various international initiatives designed
to implement the right to development, for example, help to clarify what the right
to development requires of States in the internal and external exercise of sovereign
power. But, equally as often, practice, as well as text and intent, underdetermines
the meaning of a human right, and its content will rest on a normative account of
its purpose.64
Whereas moral conceptions of human rights locate their legitimacy outside of
law and face challenging questions about their legal validity, legal conceptions thus
confront an opposite set of challenges. Determining the legal validity of an inter-
national human right is a relatively simple legal task. But legal validity does not
determine the normative purpose of a right, and legal conceptions of human rights
that seek to explain their purpose in terms that go beyond positivistic accounts of
their legal production threaten to reintroduce moral considerations into the picture,
which undermines the possibility that human rights can be understood in distinctly
62
Article 31 of the Vienna Convention, supra note 56, requires “[a]‌treaty to be interpreted in good faith in
accordance with the ordinary meaning to be given to the terms of the treaty in their context and in the
light of its object and purpose.” Article 32 of the Vienna Convention refers to the “preparatory work of the
treaty,” from which one might infer the intent of the parties as merely a “supplementary means of interpre-
tation” to be examined only “to confirm the meaning resulting the application of Article 31” or when such a
meaning is “ambiguous or obscure” or “leads to a result that is manifestly absurd or unreasonable.”
63
See Andrea Bianchi, Textual Interpretation and (International) Law Reading: The Myth of (in)
Determinacy and the Genealogy of Meaning, in Making Transnational Law Work in the Global
Economy—Essays in Honour of Detlev Vagts 35 (P. Bekker, ed., 2010).
64
This is an interpretive method that international lawyers obliquely refer to as the “teleological” approach to
treaty interpretation. See generally G.G. Fitzmaurice, The Law and Procedure of the International Court of
Justice: Treaty Interpretation and Certain Other Treaty Points, 28 Brit. Y.B. Int’l L. 1 (1951).
legal terms. For example, if the right to development imposes obligations on devel-
oped States to combat global poverty because global poverty is morally unjust, then
morality, not law, determines the purpose of the right. And if, as we will see, moral
theory struggles with casting the moral wrong of global poverty in terms of human
rights, then these struggles will simply reproduce themselves in legal accounts of
understanding the right to development in these terms.
But a legal conception of human rights need not conflate law and morality to
ground the purpose of a human right in more than the mere fact of its legal validity.
Human rights in international law are not so much formal expressions of what jus-
tice requires as a matter of abstract morality as they are legal instruments that aim
to do justice in the actual international legal order in which we live. Their purposes
ultimately rest on how we comprehend their relationship to the structure and opera-
tion of the international legal order in which they operate. Although these purposes
inescapably possess normative dimensions, forays into moral theory to determine
their normative content remain tethered to the international legal order.
On the legal conception offered here, human rights serve as instruments that
mitigate adverse consequences of how international law organizes global politics
into an international legal system. Human rights in international law are simi-
lar to other legal norms that comprise the field in the sense that they are part of
customary international law or are enshrined in treaties. But unlike other interna-
tional legal norms, which characteristically vest entitlements in States and regulate
relations between and among sovereign States, international human rights vest
rights in individuals and collectivities not necessarily coextensive with the popula-
tions of States. They thus perform a distinct function in international law. They
speak to adverse consequences of how international law deploys the concept of sov-
ereignty to organize global politics into a legal order—consequences that generate
political projects aimed at their amelioration. Some of these projects successfully
receive international legal validation in the form of human rights. Determining
the purpose of an international human right thus involves identifying the amelio-
rative role that it performs in relation to the structure and operation of interna-
tional law itself.
As a result, the possibility that human rights might possess universal and
non-universal properties does not threaten the legitimacy of legally comprehending
them in these terms. Their role in our international legal order makes sense of the
fact that some international human rights legally vest entitlements in, and impose
obligations on, some individuals and communities and not others. Nor does the
possibility that an international human right imposes positive obligations on others
threaten its standing as a human right. If the point of international human rights
law is to mitigate harms produced by the structure and operation of international
Field Missions 23
law, then—depending on the nature of these harms and the ways in which interna-
tional law participates in their production—international human rights may well
give rise to positive legal obligations to provide assistance to others. And although
their purposes rest on moral considerations that extend beyond the positive fact of
their legal existence, the normativity on which they rely is one that is internal—not
external—to international law.65 The purpose of international human rights law,
in general, is to do justice to the structure and operation of the actual international
legal order in which we find ourselves. The purpose of a particular international
human right is to mitigate harms produced by international norms that relate to its
text, the reasons for its entrenchment, and its implementation.
This account of international human rights law is not indifferent to the ongo-
ing debate between universalism and relativism. International law authorizes States
to exercise sovereign power and thus invites critical inquiry into the limits of its
authority. But by comprehending the mission of the field in terms that embrace
rights and impose obligations that speak to differences between people as well as
to features that we all share, this books seeks to redefine the debate between uni-
versalism and relativism as a debate within—as opposed to about—international
human rights law. Although some human rights in international law may protect
universal features of humanity from the exercise of State power, some international
human rights speak to contingent features of human identity. The debate between
universalism and relativism occurs in international law, in contexts where legal
entitlements protecting cultural differences clash with legal entitlements protecting
competing interests.66 Universalism does not determine the inside of international
human rights law, and relativism does not determine its outside. By conceptualiz-
ing claims about cultural difference in juridical terms, international human rights
law is even more hegemonic than cultural relativists realize. And by monitoring the
structure and operation of the international legal order, international human rights
assume a normative mission much richer than what is ascribed to them by the uni-
versal imagination. Preventing a State from threatening essential features of what it
means to be human, in other words, is but a small part of the real normative terrain
of international human rights law, which is the legitimacy of the international legal
order itself.
65
Compare Rawls, supra note 39, at 80 (a human right should receive international as opposed to domestic
protection because it is “intrinsic to the law of peoples”).
66
For an insightful assessment of the compatibility of various forms of legal pluralism with international
and regional human rights law, see Helen Quane, Legal Pluralism and International Human Rights
Law: Inherently Incompatible, Mutually Reinforcing or Something in Between?, 33 Oxford J. Leg. Stud.
675 (2013).
Unlike moral conceptions of human rights, political conceptions link human

rights to the function they perform in the broader global arena. Political concep-
tions treat international law as a subset of international politics. International law
undoubtedly is the product of political projects. But international law also struc-
tures global politics by a binary opposition between legality and illegality, conferring
legal authority on some claims of economic and political power and rejecting others
as international illegalities. The basis of an international legal order—as opposed to
a political or economic order—lies in its capacity to structure economic and politi-
cal realities by reference to a concept of legality. What transforms an economic or
political act into an international legal act is the extent to which it complies with
criteria of legality provided by international law itself. Human rights monitor the
legitimacy of economic and political acts to which the broader international legal
order otherwise extends international legal validity. While human rights may well
act as political reasons for international intervention and assistance in the practice
of global politics, the legal account offered here locates the normative force of these
reasons in the role they play in mitigating some of the adverse consequences associ-
ated with the ways in which international law constitutes global politics into an
international legal order.67
This account bears important affinities with a conception of international human
rights law advanced by Allen Buchanan. Buchanan argues that “international
human rights law has the potential to ameliorate the damage caused by … flaws
of the international legal order”—flaws which he, like Beitz, attributes to the exten-
sive latitude that the traditional international legal order conferred on States in the
exercise of their sovereign authority.68 International human rights, for Buchanan,
“constrain sovereignty for the purposes of affirming and protecting the equal basic
status of all people … and helping to ensure that all have the opportunity to lead a
minimally good or decent life.”69 The conception offered in this book is that human
rights in international law aim to ameliorate harms associated with not only the
exercise but also the distribution of sovereignty to which international law extends
legal validity. What, and how serious, these harms are is a matter of legal contesta-
tion over the scope and content of the various human rights that collectively consti-
tute the field of international human rights law.
67
Compare Joseph Raz’s conception of the rule of law in domestic legal orders. Joseph Raz, The
Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality 224 (1979) (“[t]‌he law inevitably creates a great
danger of arbitrary power—the rule of law is designed to minimize the danger created by the law itself ”).
68
Buchanan, supra note 54, at 125.
69
Id.
Field Missions 25
Specifically, human rights in international law tend to be defined in terms of the

interests that they are designed to protect,70 and what these interests are, and how
human rights should protect them, are questions that are subject to contestation in
interpretive contexts in which they are subject to legal determination. Legal con-
testation of this nature occurs over the nature and extent of the harm associated
with the structure and operation of international law that human rights seek to
mitigate. For example, international minority rights speak to harms that interna-
tional law produces when it validates new assertions of sovereignty or rearranges
the existing distribution of sovereignty among sovereign legal actors. Although the
text that enshrines minority rights in international law might provide some inter-
pretive guidance on what interests might underlie them, the nature and purpose of
minority rights are not predetermined by the text of an international instrument
in which they might be entrenched. Specifying these interests and how they should
be protected are interpretive judgments about the nature and extent of the harms
produced by international reallocations of sovereign power.
Interpretive judgments about the scope and content of any given international
human right can be guided by the norms advanced by Buchanan, namely, the equal
moral status of peoples and the opportunity to lead a decent life. And if they are,
then the effect of the human right in question is to secure these values. But interpre-
tive judgments need not be guided by these norms; they can just as easily be guided
by other universal norms, or less universal norms, as well as by text and precedent
and the various pragmatic considerations, such as efficiency, utility, and prudence,
characteristic of legal argumentation. The purpose or role of international human
rights law is not necessarily to protect these norms in the face of the exercise of
sovereign power. It is instead to ameliorate harms associated with the distribution
and exercise of sovereignty to which international law extends legal validity. The
nature and severity of these harms are debates that occur as part of the ongoing
interpretive project that constitutes the field of international human rights law in
institutional contexts in which they are subject to legal determination. To be sure,
legal debates about the scope and content of human rights are charged with ques-
tions that are moral in nature. But these debates are about morality within law; they
are not debates between morality and law.
The central claim of this book, then, is that the purpose of international human
rights law is to identify and mitigate adverse effects of the structure and opera-
tion of the international legal order. International human rights speak to distribu-
tional consequences of the fact that international law deploys sovereignty, as a legal
70
For a theoretical defense of an interest-based view of rights, see Raz, The Morality of Freedom (1986).
entitlement, to organize global economic and political realities into an international

legal order. International human rights monitor the distribution and exercise of sov-
ereign power to which international law extends legal validity. They impose positive
and negative obligations on sovereign and other legal actors to exercise the authority
they receive from international law in ways that respect the rights of all individuals
and not simply those who fall within their domestic jurisdiction. They focus on the
extent to which international legal structuring of global politics by means of a sys-
tem of sovereign States participates in the production of global economic inequality.
They impose international legal duties on all of us to improve the social and eco-
nomic conditions of impoverished people around the world – conditions for which
the structure and operation of international law are partly responsible.
Understanding international human rights law this way does not eliminate deep
political disagreement over what global justice might mean and how it might be
promoted. Nor does it relegate human rights law to a merely functional role in inter-
national political discourse. It ascribes a richer mission to the field by placing the
legitimacy of the international legal order under its watch. It comprehends human
rights as legal sites of moral and political contestation over fundamental questions
about the structure and operation of international law, but it casts these debates in
distinctively legal terms. It focuses on how international law distinguishes between
legal and illegal claims of power, including sovereign power, and how international
human rights possess the potential to monitor the distribution and exercise of inter-
national legal authority. In doing so, this account shapes legal judgment on more
precise legal questions that punctuate the field—such as what constitutes the scope
and content of specific human rights, what interests various human rights protect,
and what duties they generate—by directing these questions toward the effects of
the structure and operation of international law itself.
The Plan of the Book
The chapters that follow seek to both illuminate and defend this way of compre-
hending international human rights law first from a theoretical perspective and
then by explicating what it has to say about a number of specific human rights on
the international legal register. Chapter 2 identifies two key features of the structure
and operation of international law that give rise to the role of international human
rights law advanced in this book. The first is the deceptively simple fact that the
international legal order vests sovereign power in legal actors it recognizes as States,
entitling States to exercise sovereign power in ways that harm interests associated
with human rights. The second is the more complex fact that the international legal
Field Missions 27
order performs a distribution of sovereign power among the legal actors it recognizes
as States. Subsequent chapters offer accounts of civil and political rights, social and
economic rights, minority rights, indigenous rights, the right of self-determination,
and the right to development as instruments that mitigate some of the adverse
consequences associated with both dimensions of the structure and operation of
international law.
Chapter 3 examines the relationship between civil and political rights and social
and economic rights—two sets of rights that speak to the fact that the international
legal order vests sovereign power in legal actors it recognizes as States. This chapter
takes issue with common portrayals of these two sets of rights as, respectively, first-
and second-generation rights. It engages with portrayals that conceive of generations
of rights as chronological categories that define human rights in terms of their tem-
poral emergence in international law. It then examines conceptions that treat gener-
ations as analytical categories that sequence human rights by distinctive properties
they are said to possess. This chapter argues that generational accounts—whether
chronological or analytical—are ill-suited to the task of classification and gloss over
commonalities that all human rights in international law share, which flow from
their role in mitigating pathologies produced by how international law brings legal
order to global politics.
The remaining chapters engage with international human rights thought by
dominant accounts to be on the periphery of international human rights law, and
seek to demonstrate, to the contrary, that they are central to the mission of the field.
Chapter 4 explores why the international legal order attends to a specific subset of
social and economic rights—the rights of workers. It traces the history of interna-
tional labor rights from their origins as instruments that provided a floor of protec-
tion to shield worker protection regimes in domestic legal orders from international
competition. It identifies a competing conception of the international legal signifi-
cance of labor rights that achieved prominence after the Second World War, one
that viewed them as specific instantiations of freedom of association, which is said
to possess universal value. The chapter traces the rise of a new understanding of
international labor rights, which defines their role in terms of their capacity to mon-
itor the structure and operation of the international legal order. It illustrates this
new conception by examining what are referred to as “core labor rights” embodied
in the 1998 ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work and
their relevance to international and regional processes devoted to the liberalization
of trade.
Chapters 5, 6, and 7 are devoted to human rights that speak more to consequences
of international law’s distribution and redistribution of sovereignty to collectivities
it recognizes as States. Chapter 5 examines the international legal significance of
minority rights. It details how minority rights mitigated some of the effects of how
international political developments surrounding the dissolution of the Ottoman
Empire at the end of the First World War were vested with international legal valid-
ity. It identifies ambiguities associated with both moral and political conceptions
of international minority rights and advances an alternative account of their nor-
mative significance in international law. On this account, international minority
rights speak to wrongs that international law produces when it reallocates interna-
tional legal authority to rule people and territory from some sovereign legal actors
to others.
Chapter 6 describes developments in the International Labour Organization that
led to the gradual emergence of indigenous populations as legal actors in interna-
tional law. It addresses developments in the United Nations, culminating in the
recent adoption of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It
specifies international indigenous rights as legal mechanisms that speak to the fact
that the international legal order continues to validate what were morally suspect
colonization projects by imperial powers. It offers theoretical observations on the
legal requirements of indigenous recognition in international law, the relation
between legal recognition of States and legal recognition of indigenous peoples, and
the nature and purpose of international indigenous rights.
Chapter 7 traces the history of the right of self-determination throughout the
twentieth century in terms of three movements: from its international legal status
as a principle to that of a right; from a right that vests in the population of an entire
State to one that potentially vests in populations within and across State boundar-
ies; and from an entitlement that only had the capacity to protect existing States or
produce new States to one that also validates domestic constitutional reorganiza-
tion of a political community. It suggests that the right of self-determination now
stands to promote a just distribution of sovereign power by both protecting existing
States and authorizing the formation of a new one when an existing State fails to
secure effective measures of political representation—what international law refers
to as “internal self-determination”—for a people in its midst.
Chapter 8 focuses on the right to development—a human right that addresses
consequences of the twin facts that international law validates both the distribu-
tion and exercise of sovereign power. It seeks to shed light on how international law
contributes to global poverty by focusing on rules that determined the international
legality of decolonization projects in the twentieth century and on rules that struc-
ture the global economy. These two sets of legal norms generate a conception of the
right to development that includes positive legal obligations to provide assistance
and cooperation to developing countries to reduce global poverty and economic
inequality in the world.
2
S OV ER E IG N T Y A N D S T R U C T U R E
international law conceptually brings legal order to international

political and economic developments by a rich ensemble of diverse rules, principles,
instruments, and institutions. What binds this ensemble together into a coherent
structure is a deep-rooted commitment to a concept of sovereignty as an interna-
tional legal entitlement that vests in collectivities internationally recognized as
States. International law confers legal validity on claims by States to extensive coer-
cive power over people and territory by conceptualizing this power as State sover-
eignty. It vests States with legal authority to exercise this power at home and abroad.
By legally validating some claims of sovereign power and refusing to validate others,
international law organizes global politics into a legal order in which certain collec-
tivities possess international legal authority to govern people and territory.
International law shapes global politics into a legal order not only by legally vali-
dating some claims of sovereign power and refusing to validate others. International
legal norms that perform this validating function also effectively produce an ongo-
ing distribution of sovereign power among geographically concentrated collectivi-
ties that international law recognizes as States. International law has recognized the
sovereign power of some States for centuries, with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia,
discussed in more detail in Chapter 5, often portrayed as sovereignty’s first moment
of recognition. In other cases, international legal recognition has been much more
of a recent phenomenon. Namibia, for instance, acquired sovereignty roughly
twenty-five years ago. And, of course, international law also withholds legal recogni-
tion of claims of sovereign power from other collectivities that it does not recognize
29
as States. Although indigenous people now formally enjoy extensive rights of inter-
nal self-determination in international law,1 for example, they do not—by virtue of
their indigeneity—possess a right of external self-determination that would enable
them to acquire sovereign independence from the States in which they are located.
The legal norms that international law relies on to perform these tasks render
the distribution of sovereignty they produce capable of recalibration and realign-
ment in light of new political developments deemed to possess international legal
significance.
International law thus extends legal validity to the exercise of sovereign power by
States and performs an ongoing distribution of sovereignty among those collectivi-
ties it recognizes as States. This chapter examines in more detail these two contribu-
tions that the concept of sovereignty makes to the structure of international law. It
does so because they constitute the terrain on which international human rights
legally operate. The legal norms that international law relies on to distribute and
authorize the exercise of sovereign power have been defended for numerous reasons,
including the need “for a presumptive monopoly of the last word on public order
in any given territory.”2 Sovereignty also possesses a measure of normative purchase
to the extent that people can and do flourish by being organized into particular
political communities and, in doing so, generate a complex set of interests that merit
protection.3 And, although it does not guarantee it, “sovereignty protects the nor-
matively special status of members and their prerogative to assess the legitimacy of
their domestic system, and to struggle to make it more just, more democratic, and
more inclusive.”4 Despite these and other values associated with the role that sov-
ereignty plays in lending structure to the international legal order, it also produces
an array of adverse consequences that international human rights, on the account
offered in this book, seek to rectify.
Subsequent chapters focus on adverse consequences that arise from the fact that
international law extends legal validity to the discretionary exercise of sovereign
power by States (Chapter 3); that international institutional arrangements provide
legal validity to processes of economic globalization and transnational production
1
See U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, A/Res/61/295 Ann. 1 (Sept, 13, 2007).
2
Brad R. Roth, Sovereign Equality and Moral Disagreement: Premises of a Pluralist
International Legal Order 7 (2011).
3
Compare Rogers M. Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political
Membership 64–65 (2003) (because humanity has yet to devise ways that people can flourish without
being organized into particular political communities, we should attach moral weight to what is essential for
particular communities to survive).
4
Jean L. Cohen, Globalization and Sovereignty: Rethinking Legality, Legitimacy, and
Constitutionalism 78 (2012).
Sovereignty and Structure 31
(Chapter 4); that international law episodically transfers the power to govern peo-
ples and territories from some sovereign legal actors to others (Chapter 5); that some
collectivities have their sovereignty legally recognized for centuries while, for oth-
ers, international legal recognition is a recent phenomenon (Chapter 6); that sover-
eign legal authority vests in some collectivities and not others (Chapter 7); and that
the international distribution of sovereign power participates in the production and
reproduction of global poverty (Chapter 8).
Sover eignty and Its Exercise
The central feature of the structure and operation of international law is the concept
of sovereignty that lies at its heart. Sovereignty means different things, at differ-
ent times, to different people, for different reasons. It can be imagined as resting
in a divine being, an individual, a group of individuals, or an institution or group
of institutions. It can be imagined as absolute or limited, or both, as in one of its
earliest formulations by Jean Bodin, who defined sovereignty as absolute power lim-
ited only by the power of God.5 It can be imagined as inherent in a people, as in
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s account of sovereignty as the general will of a people,6 or
contingent on the consent of people, as in the Hobbesian account of the State as
the result of a social contract among individuals to escape anarchy.7 It can be indi-
visible, as in the case of a unitary State, or divisible, as in the case of a federal State.
Sovereignty can be “pooled,”8 “mixed,”9 “pre-,”10 “post-,”11 even “floating.”12 It can
be understood in factual terms, as a concept that organizes social, economic, and
political life by the distinctive constellation of power to which it refers; in norma-
tive terms, as a constellation of power that vests only in those entities that possess
5
Jean Bodin, Les Six Livres de la République (1999).
6
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (trans. M. Cranston, 1968).
7
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (R. Tuck, ed., 1999).
8
See Bruno De Witte, Sovereignty and European Integration: The Weight of Legal Tradition, in The
European Courts and National Courts: Doctrine and Jurisprudence (Anne Marie
Slaughter, Alec Stone Sweet & Joseph H. Weiler eds., 1998).
9
See Richard Bellamy, Sovereignty, Post-Sovereignty, Pre-Sovereignty: Three Models of the State, Democracy
and Rights within the EU, in Sovereignty in Transition (Neil Walker ed., 2003).
10
Id.
11
Id.
12
See Dora Kostakopoulou, Floating Sovereignty: A Pathology or Necessary Means of State Evolution?, 22
Oxford J. Leg. Stud. 135 (2002).
legitimate authority to rule people and territory; and in legal terms, as power that
vests in an entity lawfully entitled to its exercise.13
Cutting through some of this definitional maze, Stephen Krasner offers a four-
fold typology of sovereignty’s meaning. According to Krasner, sovereignty can refer
to a State’s international legal sovereignty, “Westphalian” sovereignty, domestic sov-
ereignty, and interdependence sovereignty.14 International legal sovereignty refers
to practices primarily associated with the mutual recognition and formal equality
of States. “Westphalian” sovereignty refers to a State’s capacity to exclude exter-
nal actors from exercising legal authority on its territory and over its population.
Domestic sovereignty refers to internal structures of State power and the capacity
of the State to exercise effective control within its territory. Interdependence sov-
ereignty refers to a State’s capacity to regulate movements of people, ideas, goods,
capital, and the like across borders. Because Krasner construes sovereignty in terms
of capacity, different States can manifest different degrees of these variants of sover-
eignty. A State like Taiwan, he notes, “has Westphalian sovereignty but not interna-
tional legal sovereignty.”15
For the purposes of understanding the structure that sovereignty lends to inter-
national law, the relevant question is not which, or which combination, of sover-
eignty’s multiple characterizations best conceptualizes its true nature. Instead, it is
to inquire into sovereignty’s meaning in international law. In J.L. Brierly’s words,
sovereignty is “an aggregate of particular and very extensive claims that states habit-
ually make for themselves in their relations with other states.”16 In international
law, sovereignty means more than what Krasner refers to as “international legal
sovereignty” and also includes elements associated with the other variants that he
identifies.17 Specifically, it refers to what international law recognizes as the legal
13
For an interdisciplinary examination of sovereignty, see Sovereignty in Fragments: The Past,
Present and Future of a Contested Concept (Hent Kalmo & Quentin Skinner eds., 2011).
14
Brad Roth offers an alternative typology, where sovereignty is understood as an empirical condition, a
policy imperative, a domestic source of constitutional power, and a legal entitlement in international law.
Roth, supra note 2, at 58. Robert Jackson distinguishes between “negative” and “positive” sovereignty.
Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third
World 26–31 (1990).
15
Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (1999).
16
J.L. Brierly, The Law of Nations: An Introduction to the International Law of Peace
48–49 (4th ed. 1949). Compare Bruno Fassbender, Sovereignty and Cosmopolitanism in International Law,
in Sovereignty in Transition: Essays in European Law 129 (Neil Walker ed., 2003) (“Sovereignty
is a collective or umbrella term denoting the rights which at a given time a state is accorded by international
law and the duties imposed on it by that same law. These specific rights and duties constitute ‘sovereignty;’
they do not flow from it.”).
17
This may be because Krasner approaches the concept of sovereignty in terms of capabilities, whereas here it
is approached in terms of the legal norms that produce its international legal existence.
power of a State to rule people and territory. International law confers legal validity
on claims by States to extensive coercive power over people and territory by concep-
tualizing this power as State sovereignty, and it vests States with legal authority to
exercise this power at home and abroad. What Paul Kahn wrote about domestic law
is equally true of international law: “morality may be without borders, but law’s rule
begins only with the imagination of jurisdiction.”18
But international law does not accept as given what States imagine is theirs as
of sovereign right, no matter how habitually such claims might occur. In a dizzy-
ing array of contexts, much of international law regulates the exercise of sovereign
power by identifying its constituent elements and managing its limits. Does sov-
ereignty entitle a State to divert its natural water supply in a way that affects the
water supply of a neighboring State? Does sovereignty authorize a State to wage war
against another State? Does it entitle a State to abuse the human rights of its citi-
zens? Does it immunize State officials from criminal prosecution in another State?
Moreover, international law does more than regulate the exercise of sovereign
power. It determines who possesses sovereignty. It establishes sovereignty’s inter-
national legal existence. Sovereignty in international law refers to what the inter-
national legal order recognizes as the aggregate of valid claims that States make in
their relations with other States. These claims can be about a State’s relations with
other States, as in Krasner’s conception of international legal sovereignty, but they
can also be about a State’s relatively exclusive power to exercise domestic, transna-
tional, and international legal authority in relation to matters that bear on its ter-
ritory and population. As subsequent chapters seek to demonstrate, international
human rights legally operate to mitigate some of the adverse consequences associ-
ated with the fact that international law entitles States to exercise sovereign power
both internally, in relation to people and resources on its territory, and externally, in
its relations with other States and in international arenas.19
It is not particularly controversial to defend the view that international human
rights operate to check the exercise of internal sovereign power. This is a commonly
held view of international human rights, whether one understands human rights
from a moral, political, or legal perspective. Where these perspectives begin to
diverge is in relation to the reason or reasons human rights check the exercise of
internal sovereign power. From a moral perspective, they do so to protect interests
that transcend the significance of State sovereignty because they relate to universal
features of what it means to be a human being. From a political perspective, Charles
18
Paul Kahn, The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship 55–56 (1999).
19
For an early formulation of the distinction between internal and external sovereignty, see Bodin, supra
note 5, at Chapter IX.
Beitz argues that the framers and early advocates of contemporary international
human rights law viewed “World War II and its precipitating events as evidence of
a structural deficiency in the system of states as it then existed.”20 As evidenced by
the practice of their framers and early proponents, the normative purpose of human
rights, for Beitz, is to address “pathologies of a global political structure that concen-
trates power at dispersed locations not subject to higher-level control.”21
The legal account advanced in this book shares important affinities with political
perspectives on human rights. It too requires international law to attend to patholo-
gies of its own making. One set of pathologies that human rights address, as Beitz
notes, is a product of the fact that international law vests States with international
legal authority to exercise sovereign power over people and territory in ways that
harm interests that legal instruments deem to be associated with human rights.
But this account is less concerned with the normative dimensions of human rights
as a discursive political practice and is more concerned with the normative role
they perform in the constellation of international legal norms in which they find
themselves—in other words, in the structure and operation of international law
itself.
It is more controversial to also defend the proposition that international human
rights check the exercise of external sovereign power, namely, a State’s relations with
other States and in international arenas. Take the fact that a State’s sovereign power
includes the legal capacity to enter into legally binding bilateral and multilateral
agreements to structure and manage its relationships with other sovereign States.
Because international law vests States with international legal personality, a State
is legally entitled to expand or restrict the scope of its sovereign power by entering
into a treaty with one or more sovereign States. A treaty has the capacity to alter the
distribution of sovereignty by enlarging or reducing the territory over which a State
can legally claim sovereign power. But a treaty can also expand or limit the jurisdic-
tional scope of authority that sovereignty vests in a State. A treaty can create legally
binding obligations on signatory States to exercise their sovereign powers in certain
ways and not others and in relation to certain matters and not others, and a failure
by a signatory State to comply with the terms of a treaty constitutes a violation of
international law.
Many of the international organizations that currently play a major role in man-
aging and coordinating relations between and among States, such as the United
Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, owe their
20
Charles R. Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights 129 (2009).
21
Id.
international legal existence to a raft of multilateral treaties resulting from an

unprecedented burst of international cooperation after the Second World War. Not
all international organizations owe their origins to this period. The International
Labour Organization, created in 1919 as part of the Versailles peace negotiations,
has a longer institutional pedigree, and the World Trade Organization was estab-
lished much more recently in 1995. These international organizations give institu-
tional voice and legal effect to a vast array of international interactions between
and among sovereign States by subjecting States to various forms and degrees of
international legal authority, including legislative, regulatory, and adjudicative
authority, the monitoring and enforcement of treaty obligations, agenda setting and
norm production, research and advice, and policy implementation. 22 If established
by treaty, these arrangements are typically binding in international law, but their
institutional design and their distributional consequences remain beyond the nor-
mative purview of an account of international human rights defined as instruments
that seek to regulate the relationship between the individual and the State in order
to protect interests that we all share as humans.
The limited normative reach of standard moral accounts of international human
rights law reveals itself in the context of contemporary bilateral and multilat-
eral agreements that mandate reciprocal tariff reductions and the elimination of
non-tariff import barriers by signatory States. Such agreements typically are pre-
mised on the assumption that regional and international liberalization of trade,
services, and investment enhances global productivity by enabling economic actors
to compete on the basis of comparative advantage, that is, the capacity to produce a
product at a comparatively lower cost than other economic actors because of partic-
ular resource or regulatory endowments associated with the national economies in
which production occurs. Because international law stipulates that a State possesses
the legal capacity to create mutually binding rights and obligations by entering into
a treaty with another State or group of States, these agreements legally structure
economic relations among States by imposing legal obligations on States to exercise
their sovereign power in particular ways and, in some cases, by establishing organi-
zations that possess the legal authority to interpret and enforce their terms.23
22
This list is adapted from Curtis A. Bradley & Judith G. Kelley, The Concept of International Delegation, 71
L. & Contemp. Probs. 1 (2008).
23
For the view that international economic law is constraining the capacity of States to exercise inter-
nal sovereignty in ways that challenge key tenets of neoliberalism, see David Schneiderman,
Constitutionalizing Economic Globalization: Investment Rules and Democracy’s
Promise (2008).
Such is the case with the World Trade Organization. The WTO is the legal
foundation of the world trading system: it establishes and enforces rules that fos-
ter liberalization of trade, services, and investment. WTO members meet periodi-
cally to attempt to reach agreement on the reciprocal reduction of import tariffs. To
ensure that States do not attempt to establish protective measures through means
other than tariffs, WTO members also undertake three standard sets of obligations
whose purpose is nondiscriminatory treatment of products by States in each other’s
markets. First, the principle of most-favored nation treatment requires a member
State to accord the same favorable treatment to the import of like products from
all member States that it accords to one member State. Second, the principle of
national treatment provides that a country cannot discriminate against like prod-
ucts imported from another State in ways that benefit national producers. Third,
the WTO requires all countries to eliminate quantitative restrictions, such as quo-
tas or embargoes, against goods imported from other States. Together with periodic
reciprocal tariff reductions, these requirements enable foreign producers to compete
more fairly with domestic producers in the markets of member States. 24
When a State exercises its sovereign power in international arenas, whether it is in
the WTO or some other international institution or setting, it has the capacity to
participate in the production of international legal norms that lead to adverse con-
sequences for individuals and groups both within and beyond its territory. In addi-
tion to checking the exercise of internal sovereign power, international human rights
operate to mitigate certain consequences associated with the fact that international
law vests in States the authority to exercise external sovereign power. Chapter 4
advances the view, for example, that international labor rights not only stipulate
that a State cannot wield its sovereign power domestically in ways that compromise
or threaten interests they seek to protect. They also guard against the possibility
that States, when exercising their sovereign power on the international stage, might
establish legal norms that validate the exercise of economic and political power that
harms workers. In a similar vein, Chapter 8 argues that the right to development
imposes a negative obligation on States when exercising sovereign power in the
international arena not to fashion rules and policies in ways that exacerbate global
poverty.25 But whether a State exercises internal or external sovereignty, the reasons
international human rights hold States to account are internal to the structure and
24
This description of the “three pillars” of the system is adapted from Arthur E. Appleton, The World Trade
Organization: Implications for Human Rights and Democracy, 19 Thesaurus Acroasium 415 (1998).
25
Chapter 8 engages the work of Thomas Pogge to advance this claim. See Thomas Pogge, World
Poverty and Human Rights (2002) (arguing that global justice imposes a negative obligation on inter-
national legal actors—including States—to not act in ways that exacerbate global poverty).
operation of international law. They represent normative judgments that interna-

tional law’s creation and distribution of spaces known as sovereign States produce
adverse consequences that require rectification in the form of human rights.
Between the National and Inter national
Some argue that the way in which international law conceives of these legal spaces
has evolved from an absolute to a conditional conception of sovereignty and
that this evolution is critical to understanding its function in international law.
In the afterword to the second edition of his influential book, Basic Rights,
published in 1996, Henry Shue argued for “building a general, global consen-
sus that state sovereignty is conditional upon the protection of at least basic
rights and that the international community not only may but ought to step in
when the failures of states to protect rights becomes egregious.”26 That same
year, drawing on the work of Frances Deng,27 the Report of the International
Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty noted that the reality
of global interdependence has steadily eroded international law’s traditional
understanding of State sovereignty as an absolute sphere of power limited only
by international law itself.28 Its authors argued that absolute sovereignty yielded
a principle of nonintervention that underpins international law’s traditional
reluctance to countenance humanitarian intervention. Gradually replacing
this absolute conception is a more conditional understanding of sovereignty
that generates a principle of responsibility. Under this conditional concep-
tion, international law vests sovereignty in a State to enable it to protect its
people. If a State fails to meet this duty, according to the ICISS, and its popu-
lation is suffering serious harm in the form of gross human rights abuses,29 the
principle of nonintervention yields to an international responsibility to protect
that population from harm by, if necessary, military intervention.30 The U.N.
26
Henry Shue, Basic Rights 174 (2d ed. 1996).
27
Francis Deng, Sovereignty as Responsibility: Conflict Management in Africa (1996).
28
Report of the International Commission on Intervention & State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect
(Dec. 2001).
29
According to the ICISS, military intervention is justified to halt or avert: (a) “large scale loss of life, actual
or apprehended, with genocidal intent or not, which is the product either of deliberate state action, or state
neglect or inability to act, or a failed state situation;” or (b) “large scale ‘ethnic cleansing,’ actual or appre-
hended, whether carried out by killing, forced expulsion, acts of terror or rape.” Id. at 32.
30
The ICISS states that the relevant principles to assess the necessity of force are: right authority, just cause,
right intention, last resort, proportional means, and reasonable prospects. Id. at 32. For the view that the
concept of humanitarian intervention should be reframed in terms of the responsibility to protect, see
Gareth Evans & Mohamed Sahnoun, The Responsibility to Protect, 81(6) Foreign Aff. 99 (Nov./Dec.
General Assembly subsequently endorsed the “responsibility-to-protect” doctrine

in its 2005 World Summit Outcome,31 as did the Security Council in resolutions
authorizing the use of force in Libya in 2011.32
Others have taken the concept of conditional sovereignty to another level by
characterizing international law as exhibiting properties of “global constitutional-
ism”33 and by linking the international legal order and domestic legal orders much
more closely than contemplated by the “responsibility-to-protect” doctrine. In addi-
tion to affirming the emergence of the concept of conditional sovereignty in inter-
national law, Anne Peters, for example, conceives of global constitutionalism as a
means of combating what she refers to as “anti-constitutional trends” occurring in
domestic legal orders by providing norms beyond the State that shore up domestic
commitments to key elements of constitutionalism, including respect for the rule
of law and human rights.34 Part of the project, too, is to imagine the international
legal order as a global constitutional order, one that does not mimic the structure
of domestic constitutional regimes but instead, through its own unique structural
arrangements, displays commitments associated with constitutionalism and the
rule of law, thereby imbuing the international legal order with a measure of norma-
tive legitimacy.
One illuminating consequence of comprehending the international legal order
through the lens of constitutionalism is that it opens the door to seeing the relation-
ship between national and international law in new ways. Mattius Kumm, for exam-
ple, writes that this relationship reveals itself to be one of “mutual dependence.”35
“The constitutional legitimacy of national law depends, in part, on being adequately
integrated into an appropriately structured international legal system,” according to
Kumm, “[a]‌nd the legitimacy of the international legal system depends, in part, on
states having an adequate constitutional structure.”36 For Peters, international and
domestic legal orders work together to ensure respect for human rights and princi-
ples of constitutionalism.37 For Evan Fox-Decent and Evan Criddle, the relationship
2002); for an analysis of the responsibility to protect in the context of U.N. peacekeeping, see Susan Breau,
The Impact of the Responsibility to Protect on Peacekeeping, 11 J. Conflict & Sec. L. 429 (2006).
31
2005 World Summit Outlook, G.A. Res. 60/1, A/Res/60/1, paras. 138–139 (Oct. 24, 2005).
32
S.C. Res. 1970, S/Res/1970, 26 (Feb. 2011); S.C. Res. 1973, S/Res/1973 Mar. 17, 2011).
33
See generally Jan Klabbers et al., The Constitutionalization of International Law (2009).
For an insightful overview of the literature and its normative limits and possibilities, see Mattias Kumm,
Global Constitutionalism and the Cosmopolitan State: An Integrated Conception of Public Law, 20 Ind.
J. Global Legal Stud. 605 (2013).
34
See Anne Peters, Humanity as the A and Ω of Sovereignty, 20 Eur. J. Int’l L. 513 (2009).
35
Kumm, supra note 33, at 612.
36
Id.
37
Peters, supra note 34. See also Anne Peters, Compensatory Constitutionalism: The Function and Potential of
Fundamental International Norms and Structures, 19 Leiden J. Int’l L. 579 (2006).
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
burst out upon us.
In a rushing spate of words he told us that they had as good as
tortured him to glean the facts about myself and my connection with
the Secret Service. But there was little that he did know and he had
not told that. However, he had been locked up ever since they took
him, and he had seen no one of our friends in the place. He was
painfully apologetic about Natalie, but I deferred that explanation
until our work was over. And with Larry in our wake we took up our
search again. I had a warm glow in my heart, though, to find that
nothing had happened to the beggar, for I was fonder of Larry than I
had realized until after his capture.
At the end of the original corridor we found a heavy door, and
beneath the edge of it a steady light was shining. We came upon it
suddenly, as the corridor took a sharp turn at this point.
When the Chief saw the light he held us back by putting out his
arms. One of the men flashed his torch on to the lock, and we saw
that the key was in the door and on our side. But the sight of the
light made us hesitate for a moment.
Then, suddenly, I leaned over to the Chief and whispered in his
ear. “Chief, this must be just about over the room of the voices. We
turned to the left once, you know, and then to the right again. And
we’ve gone just about that far.”
“By Jove, you’re right,” the Chief whispered back. “Well, here
goes, anyway!” And he stepped forward, tried the handle gently and
then abruptly flung open the door.
Our eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, and the bright
light revealed by the open door blinded us for a moment. But as we
grew accustomed to the glare we realized that we were staring into
a regular laboratory. Glass jars, retorts, burners, queer-looking glass
vessels and huge metal tanks something like those used for
compressed air lined the walls on all four sides. And there were
other types of apparatus with which I was totally unfamiliar.
But we had no time and no inclination for studying the inert
contents of the room. For in the center of the floor stood a figure,
impassively facing us, that struck a distinct chill to my heart at least.
And by the way the others stopped in their tracks, I imagine they
felt the same.
It was the figure of a man, tightly bandaged from neck to foot in
black silk, so that only the face showed. But such a face!
Without the eyes, the thin, pallid countenance, hairless and
deeply lined, seemed to express an abysmal melancholy, but a
melancholy that held no human warmth. The mouth was thin and
wide, the nose high arched and almost hooked, and the cheekbones
unusually high. The face shadowed forth, to me at least, standing,
staring in the doorway, inhuman composure, inhuman cruelty out of
sheer indifference rather than sensuality, and an inhuman weariness.
But beneath heavy brows looked out eyes that caused the rest of
the strange countenance to pale into insignificance. They were pale
blue eyes, I think, and they had the flat quality of unglazed china.
But in their depths leapt and glowed a strength, a force and a
relentless ambition and conscious power that kept us standing there
like a pack of children.
The pale eyes swept over us slowly, lingering on my face and
then slowly swerving to the Chief. In that moment eye to eye I
confess I felt an absurd desire to find a hole somewhere, crawl into
it and pull it in after me. For the man’s gaze was positively hypnotic.
But the moment his eyes left mine for the Chief, I tore my own eyes
away from his face to his body and so broke the spell.
Each limb was wrapped tightly in spiral turns of soft black silk,
and the same individual material and arrangement swathed his body.
But limbs and body were slight enough and this style of dress
enhanced this smallness. A moment after his eyes left mine he
spoke—and we stood silent like children and listened.
“Ah, ——,” he said slowly, addressing the Chief by name, “so you
have found me. Clayton was a good man for you because he is—
fortunate. If it had not been for his good fortune and the fact that I
was—badly served, the positions would certainly have been reversed
—and before long. However, you have broken into my poor house
and—I must leave it. Have you anything to say to me before I go?”
The Chief took a step forward, and I saw him shake himself
roughly as though to throw off the effect of the man’s personality.
“We’ll talk about that presently,” he said roughly. “Do you
surrender?”
A slow smile crept over the face of the man before us, a smile so
utterly mirthless and inhuman that I instinctively drew back at the
sight of it. “Surrender?” he answered slowly. “I shall never do that,
to you or any man. But I have been badly served here, and I am
fatigued with the dense stupidity of man. To-night I am—going
elsewhere—but not with you. Have you anything further to say?”
The Chief drew his revolver and pointed it at the still figure.
“Throw up your hands!” he shouted hoarsely, “or I’ll shoot you down
like a dog!” And it seemed to me that the Chief’s voice shook a little
in spite of him But no words could ever fully describe the inhuman
quality and the amazing sense of power which emanated from this
black figure, standing quietly before us. It was no wonder that
Ivanovitch and Vining, two such dissimilar types, had been willing to
serve this so-called Emperor of theirs. I do not blame the Chief in
the least, for I felt just the same, only probably more so.
The man in black slowly folded his arms, smiling slightly. “Shoot,
then,” he laughed. “It will be amusing!”
The muscles tightened all over my body in anticipation of the
coming shot. But for some reason the Chief stood there, staring at
the figure, and pointing his revolver still, but making no apparent
attempt to pull the trigger.
The Chief told me afterwards that he had hesitated out of sheer
curiosity and a desire to take the man alive and learn more about his
plans. Perhaps that is true, or perhaps this Emperor succeeded in
hypnotizing his enemy and rendering him powerless to shoot. I know
that I would have hesitated to shoot, in his place, out of sheer
respect for power.
But there was one member of our party who had suffered at this
man’s hands and who was actuated by no such scruples. There was
a little pause, as I have said, and then suddenly Larry leapt forward,
slipped the revolver out of the Chief’s hand and sent three shots in
quick succession into the figure before us.
The banging of the revolver echoed in the room, to the
accompaniment of a crash of falling glass, and the figure
disappeared as though it had dissolved into thin air. We had been
staring into a rimless, skillfully arranged mirror. The man with whom
we had been talking had been close beside us in the room on the
other side of a screen and had projected his voice in some way to
come from the vicinity of the mirror.
All this we realized far quicker than it takes to tell it. And with a
roar of rage the Chief dashed into the room, with us at his heels. At
the same moment there came a hollow, contemptuous laugh from
the side of the room and a door opened and closed again quickly.
Without waiting to call directions to his men this time, the Chief
dashed for this door and attempted to snatch it open. It resisted his
efforts, and I stepped back a little so that he could open it with his
jemmy. But the Chief was too much in earnest to stop even for that.
He too stepped back. And then he flung himself at that door like a
full-back two yards from the goal.
One of the panels gave way with a loud crack and the Chief stuck
his hand through the hole left by the panel and unlocked the door
from the other side.
“Come on,” he shouted, and he jerked open the door and flung
himself through it, with me close behind him. Then he cried out and
I heard the thud of a heavy fall. The next moment I realized that
there was no floor in the darkness beneath my feet.
I began to tumble head over heels down a flight of stairs in the
darkness, bringing up against a door at the bottom with a bang that
shook the breath out of me. And it seemed to me, during that fall,
that every time I touched a step it was either on my head where the
bullet had creased me, or on my wounded shoulder. I know that it
was the shoulder that hit the door at the bottom first.
The Chief had come to a stop just before me. Indeed he partly
broke my fall. He jumped to his feet at once and started fumbling
with this second door, but in spite of his haste I could hear him
chuckling to himself over my few well-chosen remarks about those
stairs and that door.
A moment later there came another crack and this second door
flew open like the first. I rolled out into the open air, beneath the
open sky, and jumped to my feet.
The Chief caught my arm. “There he goes,” he shouted. Then he
started to run into the night.
Sure enough, in the starlight I could make out a figure walking
quickly away from us. At the Chief’s shout it began to run. And
taking a long breath I began to run also.
The man ahead ran on for perhaps a hundred feet or so and then
suddenly darted into the doorway of a low stone building. As the
Chief and I drew closer, I gave a sudden shout, for I remembered
that low building only too well. It was the place in which I had been
imprisoned and in which I had killed Ivanovitch and his satellite.
We had gained rapidly on the figure ahead during that run, and
the latter had had to pause to get the door open, so that we were
close behind him when he finally disappeared into the building. He
slammed the door in our faces, but it did not lock. We got it open
almost at once, and as it swung outward, a dazzling glare sprang up
from the middle of the room beyond. The cylinder there had
suddenly flashed into dazzling fire.
I shaded my eyes as well as I could from the glare, and presently
I realized that a man was crouching in a corner by the big machine
which operated the cylinder. But the glare held us stationary on the
threshold for a moment, and while we hesitated, the man by the
machine darted forward and flung open the side of the cylinder
which opened toward us. In the bright light I could see the swathed
black silk about the slender limbs.
Before the searing heat that sprang out at us the Chief and I
shrank back a step or two. At the same moment the man we
pursued sent forth a wailing shriek that I shall remember as long as
I live and suddenly leapt through the opening into the heart of the
cylinder.
For an instant our straining eyes saw him glow suddenly red and
almost transparent, in a bower of leaping, licking flames. Then we
turned hastily away. When we looked back again, only the glowing
cylinder and the searing heat remained.
As the miserable man leapt into the cylinder there had come a
rush of feet from behind us. And I recovered from the shock of such
a terrible death to the consciousness that some one was plucking at
my arm.
“Clayton! Clayton! And you, Chief! For God’s sake come away!
Come out! Quick!” It was Moore’s voice.
We turned and stumbled out of the building in response to the
urgency in Moore’s tone. But we had taken hardly three steps from
the door when there came a tremendous flash of light, followed by a
roar that seemed to shake the world. With it, something crashed
against my chest and I fell to the ground.
“Chief,” I called faintly, “get Natalie——” and then darkness
swooped down upon me.
I have a vague recollection of regaining at least partial

consciousness some time later. I seemed to be lying full length on a
couch in a brightly lighted room, and I was struggling in some way
with a racking, searing agony in my chest. It seemed to me, too,
that Natalie was kneeling beside me, her lovely face pressed close to
mine.
But it was only a vague impression before I plunged back and
down again into terrible, endless darkness.
Chapter XXVI.
The Final Surprise
It seemed to me that I was struggling up through miles of deep
blue water that gradually turned to lighter emerald. Huge sea
monsters swam lazily about me, staring with curious, lackluster eyes.
I fought on, in a panic to rise above them, and broke surface at last
with a splash. But when I opened my eyes I was lying in a narrow
white bed in a hospital room. An old man with a long beard bent
over me, and beside him stood a nurse clad in white.
I stared at the old fellow curiously and he nodded at me.
“Feeling better, eh?” he asked.
I tried to fill my lungs with air, but desisted hurriedly at the stab
of pain that shot through me. “What’s the matter with me?” I
demanded.
The doctor laughed. “Nothing much. You’ve got five broken ribs
and a broken breastbone. You’ve got a bullet wound in the shoulder
that you neglected shamefully and another in the scalp. Otherwise
you’re as healthy as possible.” He shook his head. “You’ve had the
narrowest kind of a narrow escape, young man. You’ll pull through
now if you take care. But no jumping about and no hasty
movements until those ribs grow together again. We put you straight
on the operating table and that’s all done with.” He turned to the
nurse. “He’ll do now, nurse.”
The girl drew him aside and whispered a moment, and presently
the doctor returned to my side.
“There are about nineteen people outside waiting to see you. If I
let one or two of them in, will you keep quiet and be careful?”
“I sure will,” I told him.
He turned away and spoke to the nurse again. “Not more than
two,” I heard him say. Then they both went out.
I lay waiting in a fever of impatience. But in a moment the door
opened again and I was able to feast my eyes on the two prettiest
girls in New York, even if I dared not hug them.
There were a few preliminary remarks on both sides which need
not be repeated here. And then I put a question.
“Peggy, dear, did they treat you pretty well? Are you all right
again?”
“Oh, yes, Jack.” Margaret nodded brightly. “They frightened me a
good deal, and once they beat me, as I told you, but that was all.
They didn’t mistreat us much because they said that we had to keep
our looks.”
I groaned, and in spite of myself my eyes sought Natalie’s face.
She met my glance frankly. “I’m all right too, Jack,” she answered,
and with that answer a great content settled over my heart. They
had been through a terrible experience. But they would both forget!
When the first excitement of our meeting had worn off a little,
which it speedily did under the watchful and reproving eye of the
nurse, I begged the two of them to sit down and tell me some of the
news that I wanted to hear.
So they drew up chairs, possessed themselves of one of my
hands apiece and prepared to be interrogated.
“First of all, I want to know how they captured you in the first
place, Margaret?”
My little sister made a face, wrinkling up her little nose until she
looked entirely adorable. “Why, I went into that store, you know, to
buy you a present. I had only been there a minute when that Mr.
Vining came up to me and said that Mrs. Furneau had sent him for
me. He said that Mrs. Furneau had had to move her car away from
the front of the store and that she would have trouble with the
police unless she went away very soon. He had been passing and
she had sent him in, after describing me to him.
“Of course I didn’t suspect anything, and when he led me out the
side door into a side street, I looked around for Mrs. Furneau’s car.
But he was talking all the time and he led me up to the door of a car
before I ever looked. Then before I could turn back or ask any
questions, he pushed me into the car, another man grabbed me and
put his hand over my mouth and the car started. They kept me
bound and gagged and blindfolded all the time until finally they
untied me in that terrible house. Ever since then I’ve been dancing
for them at their parties. But they treated me pretty well, except for
that one night. And I knew you’d come for me sooner or later.”
I turned to Natalie. “Will you ever forgive me for sending you off
in that taxi?” I asked her.
Her smile was answer enough. “Poor Larry,” she answered. “He
did his best that night. But the taxi stopped in the Park and two men
yanked open the doors before I even knew what was going on. Your
man got his revolver out and fired at one of them a couple of times,
but the man on the other side knocked it out of his hand and they
climbed into the taxi and dragged him out. I tried to get out and run
away, but another man caught me, picked me up and bundled me
into another car. Then they tied me up and gagged me and took me
to that awful place. I saw your sister almost at once, but of course I
did not know she was your sister until afterwards. Oh, Jack——”
But at this point the nurse came up and kindly but firmly
informed them that they must go. Margaret stooped over and kissed
me, and, in spite of a stifled giggle from Margaret, Natalie did the
same. A moment later they were gone.
I was not allowed to see any one the rest of that day, nor the
next, owing to a rise in temperature, induced, according to the
doctor, by my first visitors.
But on the third day I was much better, and the doctor informed
me that arrangements had been made to move me to my own
apartment, where I was to be put in charge of a trained nurse. Mrs.
Furneau took charge of the moving, accompanied by Natalie,
Margaret and Moore, but I had no chance to talk to them till later, as
I was pretty tired after the trip.
The day after the move, however, Moore came in to see me and
we shook hands with expressions of mutual esteem. I guess we
were pretty glad to see each other again.
After the first few remarks, Moore plunged into an account of his
adventures after he had been captured that day. It seemed that he,
too, was taken straight to the house on Long Island and put through
a sort of Third Degree in the room of the voices. It must have been
pretty bad, for he did not want to talk about it much. But I found out
that the Emperor would ask him a question, and when Moore
refused to answer, they turned on some other sort of gas and put
him to sleep, waking him up, violently sick, and questioning him
again.
When they realized at last that they could get nothing out of him,
they told Moore, who was pretty well all in by that time, that the
next time the gas was turned on he would not wake up at all. But
just before they turned it on, and while Moore was bracing himself
for the end, his tormentors asked him casually whether he knew
anything about mechanics and electricity.
Grasping at a straw, Moore admitted that he was an electrical
engineer. Whereupon he was put to sleep by the kind of gas used on
me, but woke up again to find himself in a cell in the same building
in which they had locked me up. Later, they let him see part of the
apparatus which worked the cylinder, although he was never allowed
to study the thing sufficiently to get a clear understanding of the
nature of the fierce rays.
However, he was able to make certain adjustments that were
needed, and he was retained as the house electrician after that. A
few days later he was allowed, under supervision, to make the
electrical preparations for a Japanese fête. He was loose in the
building with his guard the night we attacked. His guard was killed
at the start and Moore lay low until things quieted down. Then he
came out to try to find me, saw us start for the room of the cylinder
and ran after us to warn us, for he had discovered the electrical
arrangement for blowing up the little stone house in case of an
attack. It had been a bar from one of the windows of that house
that had crushed in my ribs.
But, Moore said, no one had been able to find any trace of the
man Clark, who had disappeared early in the search, of the young
man about town who had given Moore his first clew that night on
Riverside Drive, nor, finally, of Pride. Nor has anything ever been
learned of these three.
The loss of Pride was a bitter blow to all of us. The man gave up
his life, I believe, to trace me that night, probably putting up a fight
after his car smashed up and getting killed in the process. None of
us will ever forget him. Whatever death he died, I know and we all
know that it was a good death. All honor to him and may he sleep
soundly. The Chief and Moore and I have lost a friend that we can
never replace.
Later, when the earlier report of my death had been contradicted,
I had other visitors, and I began to learn more about what had
happened after the big drug raid, as the papers called it.
The whole country rang with the affair for a while, as every one
will remember. But owing to the importance of the people who were
at the house that night, or who were found to be connected with the
gang, and the position of many of the girls who were rescued, very
few of the details got into the papers. The little book I took from
Vining’s flat was found among the Emperor’s papers. The names in
it, mostly of persons in high social positions, referred to people
whom the Emperor had got into his toils, through drugs, and to
whom he had been supplying drugs regularly, to keep them under
his thumb. The numbers after their names referred to supplies of
these drugs.
The girls in the gardens, of whom there were some ten or
twelve, were young Russian girls, smuggled into this country, and
were mostly peasants. I never heard what became of them.
As for Mrs. Fawcette, she was taken to her town house and
quietly buried from there. Nothing more was ever said about the
manner of her death, although the others know now.
The girl who was my dinner companion that first night in the
Emperor’s house came to visit me too. And since then she has
become a close friend of Margaret’s and mine, as have some of the
others whom Margaret saw at that house.
The Secret Service alone knew of the extent of the organization
which that strange man, the Emperor, had built up about him. After
the smash, the mortality, through suicide, among men and women
prominent both socially and politically, was simply appalling. But the
Department of Justice kept its own counsel and no one else ever
knew how many of these people were connected with the Emperor’s
organization, and how many were simply his victims who had
become drug addicts and had committed suicide when the supply
was cut off. And of course some of such deaths may have been
coincidences. I am not intending to imply that any one who died
suddenly at that time was necessarily involved. But it is certain that
many such people were.
There were many other details, however, which we were all
curious to know. And after some difficulty, Moore at length
succeeded in persuading the Chief to come to a little dinner at my
apartment. This was after I was well enough to sit up.
When the night finally came, there were quite a lot of us
gathered around my table. Of course Natalie, Margaret, Moore and
Larry were there and the Chief. But in addition we had invited
Natalie’s aunt and Mrs. Furneau. I had long since explained to the
former the reason for my rudeness over the telephone.
Natalie had given me permission to announce our engagement
that night at the dinner. I had done so, and relaxed nerves and the
lifting of the cloud of the last few months had made them all pretty
noisy and inconsequential over their congratulations to me. But after
Larry had set the coffee on the table and had at last consented to
take a chair between Margaret and me, for he worshiped my little
sister and positively became her slave, we settled back in our seats
and waited for the Chief’s story. I started him off with a question.
“Chief,” I said, “we’re all pretty anxious to get at the truth of this
queer thing we’ve been up against. But what I want to know more
particularly is what idea the man had, why he called himself an
Emperor, why he dabbled in drugs, and why he stole the girls and
ran that place at all. It seems to me that he was running his neck
into a noose for nothing.”
The Chief laughed.
“Well, I’ll tell you most of the details that we have learned about
the man and his gang, and you can draw your own conclusions.
“In the first place, he was a Russian aristocrat who turned
renegade to his class under the Bolshevik régime, and was given
command of a big commune somewhere in Eastern Russia after the
defeat of Kolchak. We have traced him back that far, through one of
his men whom we captured. The fellow would not talk at all until we
assured him that this Emperor of his was dead. And even then we
had to drag the details out of him. The Emperor, as he called
himself, seems to have had a tremendous personality. My own view
is that he was mad.”
“Was the whole thing the dream of a madman then?” asked
Natalie.
“Perhaps so, Miss Van Cleef,” answered the Chief. “But there was
a lot of method in his madness, I’ll say that for him.
“It seems that he was a traitor to every one but himself. He was
a man of immense wealth before the Revolution. He saw the
Revolution coming and salted a good deal of his wealth away in the
form of valuable drugs, jewels and minerals. It seems that he had
extensive connections in Siberia before and after the Revolution, and
he had built up a considerable trade in opium smuggled into China.
He had also refined the manufacture of synthetic drugs to an extent
that had never been equaled, importing them from Germany and
refining them. Besides all that, he was a mechanical and electrical
engineer of no mean order.
“When the Revolution came, he retained his liberty by joining the
Bolsheviki, even, apparently, gaining a high place in their councils.
Later he came to America, either with affiliations with the Bolsheviks
or actually as their accredited agent, for the purpose of bringing
about a Bolshevik Revolution in this country.”
“Great Scott,” I said, “was that what he was after?”
The Chief laughed. “Wait. It seems that that was only part of it.
From what we can learn from his papers and from the men he had
under him, his dream was a greater dream than that.
“He had no intention of acting as an agent of the Bolsheviks. He
was a man who believed implicitly in the inherent wickedness of
mankind—that every man and woman has his or her price—and he
set himself, on that assumption, to obtain a power which should
eventually rival that of Napoleon. And,” the Chief added, leaning
forward in his seat, “he had gone quite a respectable way toward
realizing his dream!”
We stared at him in genuine amazement this time.
“Yes,” the big man went on. “He had two methods, desire and
intimidation. He came to this country originally with immense wealth
in his possession or at his disposal. He brought a big stock of drugs
with him, which we have found, by the way. And since then he had
been importing synthetic drugs into this country from Germany in
large quantities.”
“I noticed an article on that subject in The Times some time in
November,” I interrupted. “I noticed it because it told of the amount
of synthetic drugs being smuggled to America from Germany.”
“Yes,” the Chief nodded. “The Germans perfected the
manufacture of synthetic drugs during the war and they keep our
hands full. But this man did not use, nor intend to use, his drugs
merely to gain wealth. He had a bigger motive. It was power he
wanted, colossal power, and he was in a fair way toward getting it
when we finally stopped him.
“He bought that house out there on Long Island, refitted it with
all kinds of luxuries and electrical devices, and prepared to sit back
in his web and wait for his victims. His gang was already organized,
and at least four of his principal lieutenants were men—or women—
with a good social entrée. These acted as decoys and brought the
influential people, with whom the Emperor wanted to get in touch,
to the man’s parties. Here they were given a wonderful time and
were skillfully and thoroughly drugged. To give real parties of that
kind he had, of course, to secure beautiful women—hence his
method of kidnaping beautiful girls——” and the Chief bowed very
handsomely to Natalie, who flushed and returned the courtesy
prettily.
“Just there is where the man’s personality came in. Sometimes
he would talk to his victims about life as it is to-day, and his idea of
what it should be and could be if a few resolute men made up their
minds to make it so. And in this way he actually enlisted quite a
number of persons, mostly women, in his scheme for establishing a
modern Utopia in these United States, with every man making his
own laws and a free-and-easy life, love and religion for every one.
“Of course he had no such idea in his mind, except perhaps at
first, with himself as head or Emperor. But he got these people
eating out of his hand—Mrs. Fawcette was one of them—and they
brought others. And among the others were often men of real power
and influence whom the Emperor succeeded either in enlisting in his
cause, blackmailing or drugging. If they were men in important
political positions, he got secrets out of them and then blackmailed
them. Or he threatened to destroy their public lives for them unless
they did as he wanted.
“But his safest and most effective method was to drug his victims
so subtly and with such skillfully prepared drugs that they acquired
the drug habit and the drug hunger before they were aware of it.
Then, as he was the only source of supply, they would do anything
he told them to, to get some more of the same.”
“But surely,” Moore interrupted, “you don’t believe that he could
have got away with anything like that for long, do you, sir?”
The Chief shook his head, “I don’t know, Moore,” he answered.
“Nobody would have dreamed that Napoleon could get away with
what he did get away with. And immense wealth means immense
power in the world of to-day, as the history of Hugo Stinnes in
Germany shows. Without a doubt this Emperor was a little mad—
perhaps more than a little. But who can say where genius ends and
madness begins? And the man was an organizing genius, an
electrical genius, an executive genius in his power over men, had a
genius for making money and was an expert chemist. What is more,
he had a big vision, such as it was. And that is everything.
“From the rambling versions I have been able to get out of the
few of his men who were left alive, he intended to make his power
practically absolute in this country by the underground methods I
have told you. Then, according to one man, he intended to make
himself Emperor of the World. That was the little plan he had up his
sleeve!”
We all laughed. But when I glanced at the Chief’s face I was
amazed to see that his smile was perfunctory. Evidently he did not
take this Russian’s crazy ambition quite as lightly as we did. “He was
about the most dangerous customer I’ve run up against in my
career, anyway!” he added, a moment later.
“Tell me, Chief,” I asked him, “how did he manage to run a place
like that without somebody getting on to it? I’ve been wondering
about that. I should think local people would have noticed all the
activity involved in running such a ménage. Think of the supplies
and the power he used for that big house and that huge staff.”
The Chief laughed. “That puzzled me for a while too. But he was
too clever for that. All his supplies were brought in by lighter from
New York and unloaded on the beach at night. You saw one party at
it. He brought coal that way too. And he had a big dynamo brought
from New York in the same way for his electric power. He sent a
man to the village for a few small supplies every little while as a
blind.”
“How did he get his supplies, then, into the house?”
“By another underground passage, up that little gully you saw his
men disappearing into. We stopped that hole the night we made the
raid. It was cleverly concealed with growing bushes and brush. But
they aren’t yet through exploring the place, and we expect to find
many other ‘earths’ before we get through. Acting as an agent for
the Bolshevik Government gave him practically unlimited men to
work for him, and there was little danger of their talking. These
Russians are too good conspirators for that and so are the Chinese
he had brought with him. They thought that that house was the
headquarters of the future Bolshevik Government in the United
States. The Emperor was a wonder at making people believe what
he wanted them to believe.”
“Funny there were no windows in the place.”
The Chief smiled. “That was clever, too,” he answered, “He had
had an inner shell put in the house, so that the windows showed
from the outside but showed no lights. It gave the house a deserted
appearance, which was just what he wanted.”
“By the way,” I asked, “what became of that other car that
started out with us?”
Both the Chief and Moore laughed outright at this. “Well,” said
the former, “there’s been a little feeling about that. It seems that
they had only gone a block or two when they were overtaken by a
motor-cycle cop. He told them that I had sent him with instructions
that they were to proceed at once to Coney Island, as the meeting
place had been changed. What’s more, they went. They waited
awhile, and by the time they suspected that something was wrong
and came back, you and I had gone on. We never caught the cop
either.”
“I never heard what happened to the other fellows outside that
night,” said Moore.
“Oh, they had a pretty warm time. Those fellows that tried to
blow us up on the way down came back and reported their failure,
and the Emperor stationed them outside the house to wait for us.
But of course he thought there were only the three of us. When our
men came in touch with them there was a battle-royal, the end of
which we saw from the big hall. It’s a good thing that they drove
those fellows in, or our men might have been a much longer time
getting in to us.”
“What became of Vining?” I asked him presently. “Is he going up
for trial soon?”
The Chief stared at me and shook his head slowly. “He’s gone up
for trial already,” he said gravely. “One of the fool cops out there in
—— told him that we had rounded up the gang and that the head of
it was dead. And the next morning they found Vining hanging by his
own belt from the bars of his window. We had enough evidence to
send him to the chair ten times over anyway. He took the easier
way.”
The rest of the general conversation that night was of a more
personal nature. The Chief had to leave early and we all trooped out
to the elevator to wish him God-speed. He is a great man, and
somehow I feel that I am destined, perhaps, to work with him again,
before I die, although the thing seems improbable enough. Perhaps
what Moore told me that night just before he left may have
something to do with my feeling.
I had left the others in the sitting-room, intending to take Natalie
and her aunt home later on. I had walked out to the elevator to say
good-night to Moore there. But before he rang the bell he turned
and faced me, smiling a little.
“Clayton,” he said, “I’ve got a confession to make to you. I knew
Margaret quite a while before I knew you!”
“What!—where?” I demanded.
“In town,” he answered. “I met her several times at the house of
a school friend of hers with whom she was staying. And, old man, I
made up my mind that she was the only girl in the world for me!”
I could only stare at him with my mouth open and he hurried on.
“You see, when she disappeared I had been out of the army for
some time and I was looking around for a job. I have independent
means and I was taking my time, but when I heard about Margaret I
hurried down to Washington and began pulling wires. You see I was
in the Intelligence Department in the Service. And finally I got the
Chief to take me on. I knew that you were doing all you could to find
her outside, and I thought I’d try to find her that way, for I knew
that the Department was up in the air about the number of girls that
had disappeared.
“I did not say anything about it to you then, because I could not
bear to talk about her and I saw no need. But later, when I realized
the danger you were in, I got the Chief to agree to offer to take you
on. The rest you know.” He hesitated. “But I wanted you to know,
because——”
I held out my hand to him. “It’s up to her of course, but I don’t
know any one I’d rather have for a brother-in-law,” I told him.
The grip Moore gave my hand caused me to open and shut it two
or three times to see whether anything was broken. But a moment
later he turned to me with a wry grin.
“Old man,” he said, “I’ve got some other news for you that may
explain the fact that the Chief did not laugh much to-night when we
were discussing the Emperor’s chances. It’s mean news too.”
I stared at him. “Mean news?”
He nodded. “You remember that night in the little stone house,
just before it was blown up? I was just behind you when that fellow
jumped into the blazing cylinder, do you remember?”
“Yes, I remember,” I told him.
“Well, you fellows turned away. But I didn’t. And I saw something
that you didn’t—something that I have told to nobody except the
Chief as yet. But I think—and he thinks—that you are entitled to
know it too. And I have his permission to tell you. The man who
jumped into the cylinder turned an agonized face in my direction for
a moment just before he disappeared. And, Clayton, it was not the
Emperor!”
“What!” I shouted.
Moore shook his head. “I saw the Emperor—twice. It was the
Emperor you talked to, for the Chief has described him to me. But
the man who died in the cylinder was not he. It was his body
servant. The Emperor made up all that rigmarole about leaving the
earth, or whatever it was. And he hypnotized his servant into going
to his death for him, to put us off the track. I’ve seen the servant
too, and I recognized him.”
“But then—where is he?”
Moore shook his head again. “Got away somehow. Nobody
knows how. But he’s free. His gang is broken up for some time to
come, but the man himself is still at large. The Chief is scouring the
place for him, but so far without success. That’s why he looked
grave to-night. And—I don’t blame him.”
“We’ve failed after all then.”
Moore smiled and nodded toward the room we had left. “Hardly
that,” he said. “But—the man who calls himself Emperor has
probably taken an unaccountable dislike to both of us. And—I
wanted you to know. That’s all.”
“Thanks,” I told him simply. And with that Moore took his
departure. He was leaving for Washington the next day.
There are just a few words to add.

Natalie and I were married the following spring. And in the
autumn Margaret came to live with us, having spent her summer
with old friends. Of course Larry, who had simply refused to listen to
suggestions as to finding a better job for him, had been placed in
practical command of our household as soon as Natalie and I settled
down.
Moore gave up his work with the Secret Service about the time of
my marriage, got himself a position with a firm of consulting
engineers in New York, and took to running in to see us two or three
times a week. Of course I am only a brother and these things are
hidden from me. But although Margaret goes out a good deal and
has many friends, she always seems to be at home when Moore
calls. I hope I’m right!
Of the Emperor, whom Moore and I often discuss, we have heard
nothing more. He was never captured, so far as we know. But he
has never been heard from since that night.
Possibly he’s gone back to Russia, or some place equally distant.
I hope so!
The End
Transcriber’s Note
The following changes have been made to the published text to
correct what are believed to be unambiguous printer’s errors.
“le’s” has been changed to “let’s” (Ch. XVIII).

“ananswered” has been changed to “answered” (Ch. XXIII).
Any other seeming errors have been left unaltered.

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From Recognition to Reconciliation Essays on the

Human Rights State Sovereignty and Medical Ethics

Worlds of Human Rights The Ambiguities of Rights Claiming

The Development of Outer Space Sovereignty and Property

Economic Globalisation and Human Rights EIUC Studies on

The architecture of concepts the historical formation of

Theology and the Boundary Discourse of Human Rights 1st

Rights and Wrongs under the ECHR The prohibition of abuse

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

(Based on the Declaration of Principles jointly adopted by a Committee of the

2. Sovereignty and Structure 29

3. Human Rights: Three Generations or One? 51

4. International Law at Work 73

5. The Ambiguous Appeal of Minority Rights 103

6. International Indigenous Recognition 133

7. Self-Determination in Three Movements 163

8. Global Poverty and the Right to Development 185

Bibliogr aphy 225

This way of speaking of international human rights law is a marked departure

function in global political discourse. Human rights, according to political concep-

Human R ights as Mor al Concepts

This project gathered momentum when the U.N. Commission on Human

healthcare, and education.21 It conceives of these rights as imposing obligations on

indigenous peoples are located.32 Indigenous rights can be understood as specific

But this prominence is also a function of the influence of universalism in norma-

Human R ights as Political Concepts

In recent years, political accounts of international human rights have garnered

Putting aside challenges associated with relying on originalism in international

Human R ights as Legal Concepts

on international legal norms, which validates claims by States of sovereign authority

obligations—these and other questions typically remain open to legal interpreta-

Unlike moral conceptions of human rights, political conceptions link human

Specifically, human rights in international law tend to be defined in terms of the

entitlement, to organize global economic and political realities into an international

The Plan of the Book

international law conceptually brings legal order to international

Sover eignty and Its Exercise

international legal existence to a raft of multilateral treaties resulting from an

operation of international law. They represent normative judgments that interna-

Between the National and Inter national

General Assembly subsequently endorsed the “responsibility-to-protect” doctrine

I have a vague recollection of regaining at least partial

There are just a few words to add.

“le’s” has been changed to “let’s” (Ch. XVIII).

Any other seeming errors have been left unaltered.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

START: FULL LICENSE

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