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THOMAS POGGE 
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 
(Received 15 October 1998; accepted in revised form 17 May 1999) 
ABSTRACT. A comparative examination of four alternative ways of understanding what 
human rights are supports an institutional understanding as suggested by Article 28 of the 
Universal Declaration: Human rights are weighty moral claims on any coercively imposed 
institutional order, national or international (as Article 28 confirms). Any such order must 
afford the persons on whom it is imposed secure access to the objects of their human 
rights. This understanding of human rights is broadly sharable across cultures and narrows 
the philosophical and practical differences between the friends of civil and political and 
the champions of social, economic, and cultural human rights. When applied to the global 
institutional order, it provides a new argument for conceiving human rights as universal 
- and a new basis for criticizing this order as too encouraging of oppression, corruption, 
and poverty in the developing countries: We have a negative duty not to cooperate in the 
imposition of this global order if feasible reforms of it would significantly improve the 
realization of human rights. 
KEY WORDS: cosmopolitanism, cultural diversity, democratic governance, foreign lend 
ing, global institutions, human rights, international law, justice, nationalism, Universal 
Declaration, universalism 
I 
A conception of human rights may be factored into two main components: 
? the concept of a human right used by this conception, or what one 
might also call its understanding of human rights, and 
? the substance or content of the conception, that is, the objects or 
goods it singles out for protection by a set of human rights. 
We face then two questions: What are human rights? And what human 
rights are there? I believe that these two questions are asymmetrically 
related, in this sense: We cannot convincingly justify a particular list of 
human rights without first gaining a clear sense of what human rights 
are. Yet we can justify a particular understanding of human rights without 
presupposing more than a rough idea about what goods are widely recog 
nized as worthy of inclusion. This, in any case, is what I attempt to do 
here. 
^A The Journal of Ethics 4: 45-69, 2000. ? 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 
46 THOMAS POGGE 
It is worth emphasizing that even a fully comprehensive answer to the 
first question does not preempt the second. The fact that some formulated 
right has all the conceptual features of a human right does not entail that 
it exists (can be justified as such) any more than the fact that Robinson 
Crusoe as described has all the conceptual features of a human being 
entails that there is such a person. Settling what human rights there are 
requires not merely careful conceptual analysis, but also substantive moral 
argument pro and con. 
The concept of a human right has certain central elements that any 
plausible understanding of human rights must incorporate. First, human 
rights express ultimate moral concerns: Persons have a moral duty to 
respect human rights, a duty that does not derive from a more general moral 
duty to comply with national or international legal instruments. (In fact, the 
opposite may hold: Conformity with human rights is a moral requirement 
on any legal order, whose capacity to create moral obligations depends 
in part on such conformity.) Second, human rights express weighty moral 
concerns, which normally override other normative considerations. Third, 
these moral concerns are focused on human beings, as all of them and 
they alone have human rights and the special moral status associated there 
with. Fourth, with respect to these moral concerns, all human beings have 
equal status: They have exactly the same human rights, and the moral 
significance of these rights and their fulfillment does not vary with whose 
human rights are at stake.1 Fifth, human rights express moral concerns 
that are unrestricted, i.e., they ought to be respected by all human agents 
irrespective of their particular epoch, culture, religion, moral tradition or 
philosophy. Sixth, these moral concerns are broadly shamble, i.e., capable 
of being understood and appreciated by persons from different epochs 
and cultures as well as by adherents of a variety of different religions, 
moral traditions and philosophies. The notions of unrestrictedness and 
broad sharability are related in that we tend to feel more confident about 
conceiving of a moral concern as unrestricted when this concern is not 
parochial to some particular epoch, culture, religion, moral tradition or 
philosophy.2 
1 This second component of equality is compatible with the view that the weight agents 
ought to give to the human rights of others varies with their relation to them 
- that agents 
have stronger moral reasons to secure human rights in their own country, for example, than 
abroad - so long as this is not seen as being due to a difference in the moral significance 
of these rights, impersonally considered. (I can believe that the flourishing of all children 
is equally important and also that I should show greater concern for the flourishing of my 
own children than for that of other children.) 
2 These six central elements are discussed in greater detail in the first two sections of 
my essay, "How Should Human Rights be Conceived?," Jahrbuch fur Recht und Ethik 3 
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 47 
Various understandings of human rights are consistent with these six 
points. Though I cannot here criticize all competing understandings in 
detail, I want briefly to present three of the more prominent ones as a 
backdrop to my own. I have tried to arrange the four understandings so 
that their sequence can be seen as a dialectical progression. 
The first understanding, U\, conceives human rights as moral rights 
that every human being has against every other human being or perhaps, 
more generally, against every other human agent (where this also includes 
collective agents, such as groups, firms, or governments).3 Given this 
understanding of human rights, it matters greatly whetherone then postu 
lates human rights that impose only negative duties (to avoid depriving) 
or whether one instead postulates human rights that in addition impose 
positive duties (to protect and/or to aid).4 A human right to freedom from 
assault might then give every human agent merely a weighty moral duty 
to refrain from assaulting any human being or also an additional weighty 
moral duty to help protect any human beings from assaults and their 
effects. 
I do not deny that there are such universal moral rights and duties, but 
it is clear that we are not referring to them when we speak of human rights 
in the modern context. To see this, consider first some ordinary assault, 
in a pub, perhaps, after some drinking and argument. Though the victim 
may be badly hurt, we would not call the assault a human-rights violation. 
A police beating of a suspect in jail, on the other hand, does seem to 
qualify. This suggests that, to engage human rights, conduct must be in 
some sense official. This suggestion is confirmed by the human rights that 
have actually been postulated in various international documents. Many 
of them do not seem to be addressed to individual agents at all in that, 
rather than forbearance or support of a kind that individuals could provide, 
(1995), pp. 103-120. If we can agree that these are indeed elements of the concept of 
human rights, then each human right will have these six features. The converse, however, 
does not hold, as alternative conceptions of human rights go beyond the shared core in two 
ways: (a) by further specifying the concept of human rights through additional elements 
and (b) by selectively postulating a list of particular human rights (cf. second paragraph 
above). 
3 Here is an example of U\: "A human right, then, will be a right whose beneficiaries 
are all humans and whose obligors are all humans in a position to effect the right" 
- David 
Luban: "Just War and Human Rights" in Charles Beitz et al. (eds.), International Ethics 
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 209. 
4 The first of these possibilities is exemplified in Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and 
Utopia (New York: Basic Books 1974), the second in Henry Shue, Basic Rights (Prin 
ceton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Nozick and Shue prefer to write in terms of, 
respectively, fundamental and basic rights. U\ would lead to views like theirs but phrased 
in terms of human rights. 
48 THOMAS POGGE 
they demand appropriately constrained institutional arrangements such as 
equality before the law (?7), a nationality (?15.1), and equal access to 
public service (?21.2).5 Finally, many of the rights postulated in these 
documents would also seem to be limited in scope to the territory of the 
state to which the right holder belongs or in which s/he resides: the right 
to equal access to public service in his country (?21.2) and the right to an 
education (?26.1). These rights are generally understood as not imposing 
duties upon foreigners.6 
These shortcomings of U\ suggest another understanding, Uj_, 
according to which human rights are moral rights that human beings have 
specifically against governments, understood broadly so as to include their 
various agencies and officials. This understanding solves the first problem 
by supporting a distinction between official and unofficial violations, 
between assaults committed by the secret police and those committed by 
a petty criminal or a violent husband. It solves the second problem insofar 
as governments are in a position to underwrite and reform the relevant 
institutional arrangements, at least within their own territory. And it allows 
a solution to the third problem in that one can distinguish between human 
rights that one has against one's own government and those one has against 
any government. A human right to education is a right that every human 
being has against his or her own government and therefore one that gives 
every government a weighty moral duty to ensure that each national or 
resident in its territory receives an appropriate education. A right not to be 
subjected to arbitrary arrest (?9), on the other hand, is presumably meant to 
be one that every human being has against every government whatsoever 
and therefore one that gives every government a weighty moral duty to 
refrain from arbitrarily arresting any human being at all.7 
5 I use the symbol "?" throughout to refer to articles of the Universal Declaration of 
Human Rights, which was adopted and proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United 
Nations on December 10, 1948, as resolution 217A(IH). By drawing on the Universal 
Declaration for examples and illustrations, I am not implying that all the rights it lists are 
human rights or that its list is complete. Rather, I am using these rights as evidence for how 
the concept of human rights has been understood in the post-W.W.II era, on the assumption 
that any plausible understanding of human rights must be critically developed out of this 
established and customary notion. 6 The right to equal pay for equal work (?23.2) would seem to be doubly limited 
in scope. No duty to help maintain such equality within some country is imposed upon 
foreigners. And the principle needs to be satisfied only within each state, not internation 
ally: Equal work may be more highly rewarded in Switzerland than in Bangladesh. 
7 This distinction will not be clear-cut as some human rights may have components 
that differ in scope. The human right not to be subjected to torture (?5), for example, 
is presumably meant to give each government negative duties not to use torture as well 
as positive duties to prevent torture. The negative duties are most plausibly construed as 
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 49 
The main problem with U2 is that it completely unburdens private 
human agents. So long as one is not a government official, one need not 
worry about human rights at all. In response, it might be said that in a 
democracy it is ultimately the people at large who, collectively, constitute 
the government. But this response does not solve the problem in regard to 
other kinds of regimes. Persons who live under an undemocratic govern 
ment need not worry about human rights at all, because it is the duty of 
that government alone to fulfill human rights - including the human right 
of its subjects to take part in government (?21.1). On this understanding, 
wealthy and influential nationals would have no moral duty to do anything 
to stop or to mitigate human-rights violations that their non-democratic 
government is committing against their compatriots or against foreigners 
- 
at least they would have no moral duty arising from the human rights of the 
victims. This limitation is not only morally implausible; it also goes against 
common parlance in that we speak of a society's human-rights record 
and of how well human rights are respected in some country, thereby 
suggesting that we do not assign sole responsibility to the government. 
This problem is avoided by yet another understanding, J73, according 
to which human rights are basic or constitutional rights as each state ought 
to set them forth in its fundamental legal texts and ought to make them 
effective through appropriate institutions and policies.8 So understood, a 
human right might be said to have two quite distinct components: juridifi 
cation and observance. Through its juridification component, a human 
right to X would entail that every state ought to have a right to X enshrined 
in its constitution (or comparable basic legal documents). A human right 
to X would contain, then, a moral right to effective legal rights to X, which 
gives every citizen of a state a weighty moral duty to help ensure that an 
effective and suitably broad legal (or better: constitutional) right toX exists 
general: A government must not order or authorize the torture of any human being at all. 
But the positive duties are most often construed as being limited in scope: A government 
must prevent torture on territory it can effectively control, but not elsewhere. 
8 Thus, for example, Jurgen Habermas, "The concept of human rights is not of moral 
origin, but ... by nature juridical." Human rights "belong, through their structure, to a 
scheme of positive and coercive law which supports justiciable subjective right claims. 
Hence it belongs to the meaning of human rights that they demand for themselves the 
status of constitutional rights." Jurgen Habermas, "Kants Idee des Ewigen Friedens 
- aus 
dem historischen Abstand von 200 Jahren," Kritische Justiz 28 (1995), pp. 293-319. The 
quotes are from p. 310 and p. 312, italics are in the original, the translation is mine. Though 
Robert Alexy explicitly refers to human rights as moral rights, he holds an otherwise 
similar position which equates the institutionalization of human rights with their transfor 
mation into positive law. See Robert Alexy, "Die Institutionalisierung der Menschenrechte 
im demokratischen Verfassungsstaat" in Stefan Gosepath and Georg Lohmann (eds.), Die 
Philosophic der Menschenrechte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), pp. 244-264. 
50 THOMAS POGGE 
within this state.9 Through its observance component, a human right to X 
would give a weighty moral duty to each government and its officials to 
ensure that the right to X 
- whether it exists as a legal right or not 
- is 
observed. 
Though a definite improvement over U\ and ?/2, this understanding still 
faces three problems. First, C/3 may render human rights too weak, for even 
when a human right is appropriately juridified and the corresponding legal 
rights are observed and reliably enforced by the government and the courts, 
citizens may still be prevented by social obstacles from enjoying the object 
of the human right in question.10 Being illiterate or uneducated, they may 
not know what their legal rights are, or they may lack either the knowledge 
or the minimal economic independence necessary to claim these rights 
through the proper legal channels. This problem can be avoided by inter 
preting "observance" in a demanding sense as requiring that human rights 
be made fully (not merely legally) effective so as to ensure secure access 
to their objects.11 I use the word "fulfillment" for this demanding sense of 
"observance" and say more about this notion below. 
The second problem with J/3 is that, in regard to some human rights, 
its juridification component would seem to be excessively demanding. 
Consider a human right to adequate nutrition (?25.1). A society may be so 
situated and organized that all its members have secure access to adequate 
nutrition, though not a legal right thereto. Would this leave the human 
right unfulfilled? Having the legal rights required by the juridification 
component is good, to be sure, but hardly so important that it must be built 
into the concept of a human right. Secure access is what really matters, 
and if this can be achieved through, for example, a reliable kinship system 
backed up by efficient charitable organizations, then an additional legal 
9 The expression "suitably broad" alludes to how U2 had solved the third problem with 
U\. Some human rights 
- such as the human right not to be subjected to arbitrary arrest (?9) 
- are meant to protect every human being regardless of location or citizenship. Such human 
rights would not be fully juridified through a constitutional right that prohibits merely the 
government's arbitrary arrest of its own citizens or residents but not that of foreigners. The 
juridification component of my human right not to be subjected to arbitrary arrest would 
then give a weighty moral duty to every citizen of every state to help ensure that his or her 
state affords me (and, of course, every other human being) a legal right not to be arbitrarily 
arrested by its government. 1 ? This problem could not arise, if human rights had effective legal (constitutional) rights 
as their sole objects. I am assuming here that, for at least some human rights, this is not the 
case. 
1 ] As the examples indicate, my notion of secure access involves a knowledge condi 
tion: A person has secure access to the object of some human right only when she is not 
prevented by social obstacles from acquiring the knowledge and know-how necessary to 
secure this object for herself. 
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 51 
right to adequate food when needed would not seem to have the essential 
importance we rightly associate with demands made in behalf of human 
rights. The juridification component of t/3 is likely to lead to a conception 
of human rights diluted by elements that are not truly essential.12 Insistence 
on the juridification of human rights also provokes the communitarian and 
East Asian criticism that human rights lead persons to view themselves as 
Westerners: atomized, autonomous, secular and self-interested individuals 
ready to insist on their rights no matter what the cost may be to others or 
the society at large.13 
The third problem with f/3 is that it excessively unburdens agents with 
regard to human-rights fulfillment abroad. According to t/3, our task as 
private citizens or government officials is to ensure that human rights 
are juridified and fulfilled in our own society and also observed by our 
government abroad. We have no human-rights based duties to promote the 
fulfillment of human rights in other countries or to help suppress human 
rights violations by foreign governments 
- 
though it may be morally 
praiseworthy, of course, to work on such projects. But, you will ask, what 
is wrong with this unburdening? How can, and why should, we be held 
responsible for the extent to which human rights remain unfulfilled in other 
parts of the world? 
II 
We find the beginnings of an answer to these questions in what may well 
be the most surprising and potentially most consequential sentence of the 
entire Universal Declaration: "Everyone is entitled to a social and interna 
tional order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration 
can be fully realized" (?28). This article has a peculiar status. As its 
reference to "the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration" indi 
cates, ?28 does not add a further right to the list, but rather addresses 
12 This is not to deny that some human rights are difficult or impossible to fulfill without 
corresponding legal or even constitutional protections. This is clearly true, for example, of 
a human right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating 
fundamental rights granted by the constitution or by law (?8). It is also hard to imagine 
a society under modern conditions whose members are secure in their property or have 
secure access to freedom of expression even while no legal right thereto exists. I assume 
below that secure access to the objects of civil and political human rights generally requires 
corresponding legal protections. 
13 This criticism has been voiced, for instance, by Singapore's patriarch Lee Kuan Yew 
and by Mary Ann Glendon: Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New 
York: The Free Press, 1991). 
52 THOMAS POGGE 
the concept of a human right, says something about what human rights 
are. It is then consistent with any substantive account of the objects that 
a scheme of human rights ought to protect 
- even while it significantly 
affects the meaning of any human rights postulated in the other Articles of 
the Universal Declaration: They all are to be understood as claims on the 
"order," or institutional structure, of any comprehensive socialsystem.14 
?28 suggests then a fourth, institutional understanding of human rights, 
I/4. According to C/4, postulating a human right to X is tantamount to 
declaring that every society (and comparable social system) ought to be 
so organized that all its members enjoy secure access to X. To be sure, no 
society can make the objects of all human rights absolutely secure. And 
making them as secure as possible would constitute a ludicrous drain on 
societal resources for what, at the margins, might be very minor benefits 
in security. To be plausible, any conception of human rights that uses 
the concept I propose must therefore incorporate an idea of reasonable 
security thresholds: Your human rights are fully realized (fulfilled) when 
their objects are sufficiently secure 
- with the required degrees of security 
suitably adapted to the means and circumstances of the relevant social 
system.15 
E/4 can be further specified through two plausible assumptions: (1) 
Social and international orders that do not satisfy the condition of ?28 
can be ranked by how close they come to fully reaUzing human rights: 
Social systems ought to be structured so that human rights can be realized 
in them as fully as possible. (2) One can judge how fully human rights 
can be reaUzed in some institutional order by how fully they generally are, 
or (in the case of a hypothetical order) generally would be, realized in it. 
In light of these two assumptions, ?28 is then interpreted as holding that 
the assessment of an institutional order is to be based primarily on how 
14 
My reading of ?28 emphasizes its statement that all human beings have a claim that 
any institutional order imposed upon them be one in which their postulated rights and 
freedoms can be fully realized. ?28 would seem to make the additional statement that 
human beings have a claim that such an order be newly established in any (state-of-nature 
or "failed state") contexts in which no institutional order exists. 
15 Thus, your human right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association is fulfilled 
by some institutional order, when it is sufficiently unlikely that your attempts to associate 
or assemble with others would be thwarted or punished by official or nonofficial agents or 
agencies. Of course, what is unlikely may nevertheless happen. According to U4, a person 
may actually be assaulted even while his human right to physical security (?3) is fulfilled, 
and another's like right may be unfulfilled even while she suffers no actual attack. The task 
of specifying, for the object of each particular human right, acceptable probabilities for 
threats from various sources belongs to the second, substantive component of a conception 
of human rights. 
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 53 
much better or worse human rights are or would be fulfilled in it than in its 
feasible alternatives. 
Although it leaves open which purported human rights we ought to 
accept as such, U4 is nevertheless normative, and this not merely in the 
trivial sense that it presents itself as the most plausible explication of a 
commonly used expression. It is normative also in that - on the assumption 
that human rights express weighty moral concerns 
- it entails a significant 
moral thesis (whose precise content depends, however, on which particular 
human rights will be included in our conception): Any institutional order is 
to be assessed and reformed principally by reference to its relative impact 
on the fulfillment of the human rights of those on whom it is imposed.16 
Pursuant to t/4, human rights are then the paramount elements in 
the comparative assessment of institutional schemes. A human right to 
freedom of peaceful assembly and association, for example, implies that 
human beings have a moral claim that their society be structured in such 
a way that they can securely exercise these two freedoms. To honor this 
claim, we must ensure not merely that our government and its officials 
respect these freedoms, but also that limitations and violations of them on 
the part of other persons are effectively deterred and prevented. 
This last point is a crucial element of the institutional understanding 
of human rights. An institutional order fails to fulfill human rights even 
if it merely fails sufficiently to protect their objects.17 And yet, insecure 
access to the objects of human rights is nevertheless more serious when 
its source is official. It is, other things equal, more important that our laws 
and the agents and agencies of the state should not themselves endanger the 
objects of human rights than that they should protect these objects against 
other social dangers.18 
16 Relative, because we are making a comparative judgment: about how much better or 
worse human rights are fulfilled in this institutional order than they would be fulfilled in 
its feasible alternatives. 
17 One may think here of the, still common, official tolerance for domestic violence 
against women. 18 This differential weighing is deeply rooted in our moral thinking and shows itself, 
for instance, in our attitudes toward the criminal law and the penal system. The point 
can be illuminated most economically, perhaps, by distinguishing, in a preliminary way, 
six ways in which a social order may affect the goods and ills of its participants. The 
following illustration uses six different scenarios, arranged in order of their intuitive moral 
significance, in which, due to prevailing social institutions, certain innocent persons are 
avoidably deprived of some vital nutrients V (the vitamins contained in fresh fruit, say): 
First-class shortfalls are officially mandated, paradigmatically by the law (legal restrictions 
prevent certain persons from buying foodstuffs containing V). Second-class shortfalls arise 
from legally authorized conduct of private subjects (sellers of foodstuffs containing V 
lawfully refuse to sell to certain persons). Third-class shortfalls &?zforeseeably engendered 
54 THOMAS POGGE 
If a society's institutional order avoidably fails to fulfill human rights, 
then those of its members who do not support the requisite institutional 
reforms are violating a negative duty of justice: the duty not to cooperate 
in the imposition of an unjust institutional order without making serious 
efforts within their means toward initiating and supporting appropriate 
institutional reforms. On C/4, your human rights are then not only moral 
claims on any institutional order imposed upon you, but also moral claims 
against those (especially: more influential and privileged) persons who 
contribute to its imposition.19 
Ill 
I/4 could be rather close to U3, if "institutional order" were interpreted 
narrowly as referring only to national schemes of social institutions. 
However, ?28 explicitly rules out this reading by insisting that human 
rights involve claims on institutional schemes in general and on our global 
("international") institutional order in particular. The remainder of this 
through the uncoordinated conduct of subjects under rules that do not specifically mention 
them (certain persons, suffering severe poverty within an ill-conceived economic order, 
cannot afford to buy foodstuffs containing V). Fourth-class shortfalls arise from private 
conduct that is legally prohibited but generally tolerated (sellers of foodstuffs containing 
V illegally refuse to sell to certain persons, but enforcement is lax and penalties are mild). 
Fifth-class shortfalls arise from natural factors whose effects social rules avoidably leave 
unmitigated (certain persons are unable to metabolize V due to a treatable genetic defect 
but are not receiving the treatment that would correct their handicap). Sixth-class short 
falls, finally, arise from self-caused factors whose effects social rules avoidablyleave 
unmitigated (certain persons are unable to metabolize V due to a treatable self-caused 
disease - brought on, perhaps, by their maintaining a long-term smoking habit in full 
knowledge of the medical dangers associated therewith 
- and are not receiving the treat 
ment that would correct their ailment). Behind the moral significance we attach to these 
distinctions lies the idea that our social institutions and their political and legal organs 
should not merely serve justice, but also symbolize it. The point is important, because it 
undermines the plausibility of consequentialist (e.g., utilitarian) and hypothetical-contract 
(e.g., Rawlsian) conceptions of justice which assess social institutions from the standpoint 
of prudent prospective participants, who, of course, have no reason to care about this 
distinction among sources of threats. My critique of such recipient-oriented conceptions 
of justice is presented in "Three Problems with Contractarian-Consequentialist Ways of 
Assessing Social Institutions," Social Philosophy and Policy 12 (1995), pp. 241-266, esp. 
Section 5 [and in "Gleiche Freiheit fiir alle?" in Otfried Hbffe (ed.), Rawls' "Theorie der 
Gerechtigkeit" (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997)]. 
19 This understanding of human rights is laid out more extensively in my "How Should 
Human Rights Be Conceived?," Jahrbuch fur Recht und Ethik 3 (1995), pp. 103-120. That 
earlier essay applied the idea only to the case of national institutional schemes, while the 
present one applies it mainly to our global institutional order. 
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 55 
essay will concentrate on this more specific moral thesis: that our global 
institutional order is to be assessed and reformed principally by refer 
ence to its relative impact on human rights fulfillment. This is one way 
of saying that human rights in our time have global normative reach: A 
person's human rights entail not merely moral claims on the institutional 
order of her own society, which are claims against her fellow citizens, but 
also analogous moral claims on the global institutional order, which are 
claims against her fellow human beings. Our responsibilities entailed by 
human rights are engaged by our participation in any coercively imposed 
institutional order in which some persons avoidably lack secure access to 
the objects of their human rights, and these (negative) responsibilities are 
extended, then, through the emergence of a global institutional order in 
whose coercive imposition we collaborate.20 
This thesis must be distinguished from another, more common but also 
less plausible, moral assertion, which emerges when, in the context of U\, 
human rights are interpreted as entailing (positive) duties to protect 
- the 
assertion, namely, that we ought to defend, as best we can, the objects 
of the human rights of any person anywhere. While postulating merely 
positive (and thus presumably weaker) responsibilities, this thesis is also 
stronger than mine in that it does not make the global normative reach 
of human rights conditional upon the existence of a worldwide institu 
tional order through which our political and economic decisions have a 
significant impact on the lives of persons all over the world. My thesis 
does involve this conditionality: What ?28 is asking of the citizens and 
governments of the developed states is not that we assume the role of a 
global police force ready to intervene to aid and protect all those whose 
human rights are imperiled by brutal governments or (civil) wars, but that 
we support institutional reforms toward a global order that would strongly 
support the emergence and stability of democratic, rights-respecting and 
peaceful regimes and that would also tend to reduce radical economic 
deprivations and inequalities, which now engender great vulnerabilities 
20 On the stronger reading of ?28 (cf. footnote 14), we would have such responsibilities 
to establish a global institutional order that fulfills human rights even if no such order 
existed at present. It is doubtful, however, whether these responsibilities could, in such a 
context, be considered to be negative ones. Immanuel Kant suggests that they may be: "A 
human being (or a people) in a mere state of nature robs me of this assurance and injures 
me through this very state in which he coexists with me 
- not actively (facto), but through 
the lawlessness of his state (statu iniusto) through which I am under permanent threat from 
him - and I may compel him either to enter with me into a common juridical state or to 
retreat from my vicinity" [Immanuel Kant, "Zum ewigen Frieden" (1795), in Preufiische 
Akademieausgabe, Vol. VIII (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1923), 349n (my translation)]. 
56 THOMAS POGGE 
to civil rights violations as well as massive premature mortality from 
malnutrition and easily curable diseases. 
I have encountered much resistance to this moral thesis, especially 
from social theorists. It is not the case, of course, that these critics are 
opposed to human-rights fulfillment. Not at all. Rather, they dispute the 
empirical presuppositions of my moral thesis, which are that the fulfill 
ment of human rights importantly depends on the structure of our global 
institutional order and that this global institutional order is to some extent 
subject to intelligent (re)design by reference to the imperative of human 
rights fulfillment. Let me then try to make plausible that these empirical 
presuppositions hold. 
Talk of "our global institutional order" sounds horribly abstract and 
requires at least a brief explication. There is, first and foremost, the insti 
tution of the modern state. The land surface of our planet is divided into 
a number of clearly demarcated and non-overlapping national territories. 
Human beings are matched up with these territories, so that (at least for 
the most part) each person belongs to exactly one territory. Any person 
or group effectively controlling a preponderant share of the means of 
coercion within a territory is recognized as the legitimate government 
of both the territory and the persons belonging to it. This government is 
entitled to rule "its" people through laws, orders and officials, to adjudicate 
conflicts among them, and to exercise ultimate control over all resources 
within the territory ("eminent domain"). It is also entitled to personify 
its people against the rest of the world: to bind them vis-a-vis outsiders 
through treaties and contracts, to regulate their relations with outsiders, to 
declare and prosecute wars in their name, and to control outsiders' access 
to the country's territory. In this second role, a government is considered 
continuous with its predecessors and successors: bound by the undertak 
ings of the former, and capable through its own undertakings of binding 
the latter. There are, of course, various minor deviations21 and also many 
further, less essential features of our global order. But these most basic 
features will suffice for now. 
I will try to show through two examples that there are feasible reforms 
of our global order that would, quite clearly, lead to substantial gains in 
terms of human rights fulfillment. My first example concerns the currently 
21 There are stateless persons, persons with multiple nationalities and those who are 
citizens of one country but reside in or are visiting another. We have Antarctica, continental 
shelves, disputed areas and areas that are contracted out (such as Guantanamo Bay and 
Hong Kong, though the latter case is also a beautiful illustration of the continuity condi 
tion). And groups are sometimes recognized as the legitimate government even though they 
do not control a preponderant share of the means of coercion within the relevant territory 
(Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in the 1980'sor Bertrand Aristide in the 1990's). 
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 57 
prominent topic "transition to democracy." Much has been written on how 
a new democratic government should deal with the crimes committed by 
an evil predecessor. Much less, and far too little, has been written about 
how a new democratic government might reduce the likelihood of demo 
cratic institutions being overturned once again in the future. Yet, even 
more important is the extension of this forward-looking question to our 
global institutional order: How can global institutions be reshaped so as to 
become more supportive of democratic government? So long as the inter 
national criterion for the legitimacy of governments is effective control, 
there are strong incentives (e.g., for military commanders) to overthrow 
a democratic government: Once in power, putschists can count on all the 
rewards of international recognition. They can, for example, control and 
hence profit from the sale of the country's natural resources.22 They can 
also borrow funds abroad in the name of the whole country (the "interna 
tional borrowing privilege") and then spend these funds to entrench their 
rule. Foreign bankers need have no special worries about being repaid in 
the event that democracy returns, because any future government will be 
considered obligated to repay the loans of any predecessor and will have 
to comply on pains of being shut out of the international credit markets. 
Could we modify our global order so that it exerts a more favorable 
influence on the stability of democratic governments? One might begin 
by proposing, as a principle of international law, that a people need not 
repay loans incurred by a government that ruled them in violation of 
constitutionally recognized democratic procedures. This principle prevents 
neither putschists from coming to power nor lenders from loaning money 
to putschists. But it does render such loans considerably more risky and 
thereby entails that putschists can borrow less 
- and this on less favorable 
terms. It thus reduces the staying power of undemocratic governments and 
the incentives for attempting a coup in the first place. 
This proposal needs refinement, especially in two respects. First, it 
requires the instituting of a neutral council that would determine, in 
an internationally authoritative way, whether a particular government is 
constitutional or not.23 This council might be fashioned on the model 
2 The great importance of this "international resource privilege" is extensively 
discussed in my lecture "On International Redistribution" (Stanford University, April 16., 
1999). 
23 This council would work only in the interest of democratic constitutions. Its deter 
minations would have consequences not only for a government's ability to borrow abroad, 
but also for its domestic and international standing. A government that has been officially 
declared illegitimate would be handicapped in myriad ways (trade, diplomacy, investments, 
etc.) - a fact that would contribute to the deterrent effect of the proposed institution and 
hence to its tendency to reduce the frequency of coup attempts and civil wars. 
58 THOMAS POGGE 
of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, but it should also 
have specially trained personnel for observing 
- and in special cases even 
conducting 
- national elections. Democratic governments could facilitate 
the work of the council, and thereby contribute to the stability of democ 
racy in their country, by incorporating into their written constitutions or 
basic laws clear legitimacy criteria that also fix precisely how these criteria 
can be legitimately revised. 
Second, a destabilizing influence on existing democratic governments 
must be ruled out. Such an influence might come about as follows. If 
an officially illegitimate government cannot, in any case, borrow abroad 
in the name of the entire country, it may see no reason to service debts 
incurred by democratic predecessors. This fact might make borrowing 
abroad more difficult for democratic governments perceived to be in 
danger of being overthrown 
- which would not be, of course, in the 
spirit of my proposal.24 This difficulty might be overcome through an 
international loan insurance fund that services the debts of democratically 
legitimate governments whenever illegitimate successors refuse to do so. 
This fund, just as the council proposed above, should be financed jointly 
by all democratic states. This would require some states, the enduringly 
stable democracies, to contribute to a fund from which they will hardly 
ever profit directly. Their financial contribution would, however, be small, 
because my proposal would render the overthrow of democratic regimes 
much less frequent, and it would also be well justified in view of the gain 
for democratization, which would bring with it gains for the fulfillment of 
human rights and the avoidance of wars and civil wars.25 
24 I want to thank Ronald Dworkin for seeing this difficulty and for articulating it 
forcefully. 
25 An existing alternative proposal would allow each country to authorize military 
interventions against itself for the event that a future government significantly violates 
democratic principles (Farer) or human rights (Hoffmann) [see Tom J. Farer, "The United 
States as Guarantor of Democracy in the Caribbean Basin: Is There a Legal Way?" Human 
Rights Quarterly 10 (1988), pp. 157-176; "A Paradigm of Legitimate Intervention" in Lori 
Fisler Damrosch (ed.), Enforcing Restraint: Collective Intervention in Internal Conflicts 
(New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1993), pp. 316-347; and Stanley Hoff 
mann, "Delusions of World Order," New York Review of Books 39 (1992), pp. 37-43], 
Proposals of this kind have two drawbacks: Military interventions will, sometimes at 
least, be bloody, and decisions about intervention will generally be co-determined by 
extraneous (e.g., strategic) interests of the potential intervening states. Without rejecting 
(or supporting) such proposals, I have here suggested a less radical and less risky modifi 
cation which shows more clearly I believe (though I could not present all its details and all 
significant objections against it) that our current world order could, with some good will on 
the part of the rich countries, be modified so that it would exert a significant force toward 
democratization. 
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 59 
My other example concerns severe and widespread poverty in the 
context of extreme socioeconomic inequality. In the existing global order, 
which allocates property rights in natural resources territorially to the 
various states or their governments, hundreds of millions suffer severe 
poverty and malnutrition26 and all the associated, easily and cheaply 
curable but still often deadly diseases.27 I have argued elsewhere that this 
suffering could be abolished rather quickly through the introduction of a 
Global Resources Dividend (GRD).28 This proposal is modest in that it 
accepts the existing state system and, in particular, leaves each national 
government in control of the natural resources in its territory. Governments 
are required, however, to pay a proportional dividend on any resources 
they decide to use or sell. The word "dividend" indicates that the proposal 
regards all human beings, including those whose access to resources is now 
severely restricted, as owning an inalienable stake in all limited natural 
resources. As with preferred stock, this stake confers no control over 
whether or how natural resources are to be used, but merely a claim to 
share in their economic benefits. The GRD could cover all mineral wealth 
as well as the use of soil (in agriculture) and of air and water (e.g., for 
dischargingpollutants). 
26 1.3 billion persons, that is 22 percent of the world's population, live below the inter 
national poverty line, which means that their daily income has less purchasing power than 
one Dollar had in the US in 1985, less purchasing power than $1.53 has in the US today. 
As a consequence of such severe poverty, 841 million persons (14 percent of humankind) 
are today malnourished, 880 million (15 percent) are without access to health services, one 
billion (17 percent) are without adequate shelter, 1.3 billion (22 percent) are without access 
to safe drinking water, two billion (33 percent) are without electricity and 2.6 billion (43 
percent) are without access to sanitation [UNDP: Human Development Report 1998 (New 
York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 49]. As a further consequence of such severe 
poverty, a quarter of all children between 5 and 14, 250 million in all, are compelled to 
work, often under cruel conditions in mines, quarries and factories as well as in agriculture, 
construction, prostitution, textile and carpet production: "At least 120 million children 
between the ages of 5 and 14 work full time. The number is 250 million, or more than 
twice as many, if we include those for whom work is a secondary activity" (International 
Labor Organization: http://www.ilo.org/public/english/270asie/feature/ch ild.htm). 
^ About one third of all deaths, some 50,000 daily, are due to poverty-related causes 
such as measles, pneumonia and diarrhea, which could easily be prevented through 
adequate nutrition and safe drinking water or be cured through cheap rehydration packs 
and antibiotics [United Nations Children's Fund: The State of the World's Children 1998 
(New York: Oxford University Press 1998)]. 
28 Thomas W. Pogge, "A Global Resources Dividend" in David A. Crocker and Toby 
Linden (eds.), Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life, Justice, and Global Stewardship 
(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). This essay discusses the details of the proposals, 
reasons for and against, as well as an important alternative to it: the so-called Tobin Tax. 
60 THOMAS POGGE 
Proceeds from the GRD are to be used toward the emancipation of the 
present and future global poor so that finally all human beings will be able 
to meet their basic needs with dignity. The point is then not merely to 
improve the nutrition, medical care and sanitary conditions of the global 
poor, but also to ensure that they themselves can take care of their basic 
interests and defend these effectively against the ambitions of politically 
and economically more powerful persons and groups. To achieve this, they 
must be free from relations of personal dependence and be literate, they 
must have certain basic rights and be able to understand and defend them, 
and they must be able to learn a profession and to participate as equals in 
the economy as well as in politics. 
In an ideal world, GRD payments could be made directly to the govern 
ments of the poorest societies, which could use them to free their poorest 
citizens from taxes and debts, to improve their education, medical care and 
infrastructure, and to offer them, or their organizations, land, capital, or 
low-interest loans. So long as governments are prone to corruption, it will 
often be more efficient to use other channels for the same purpose: inter 
national organizations such as UNICEF, UNDP, WHO, or Oxfam, which 
would need to be reorganized in light of their new tasks and whose perfor 
mance, like that of governments, would have to be continuously monitored. 
The inefficiency of conventional development aid29 underscores the need 
for these organizations to be oriented exclusively toward poverty eradica 
tion and hence to be insulated, as far as possible, from the strategic and 
economic interests of all governments. 
A government may make it entirely impossible to improve the circum 
stances of the poor in its country. In such cases, the funds should go 
elsewhere, where they will make a difference in reducing poverty and 
disadvantage. The point of the GRD is, after all, to secure for the poorest 
persons (not states) their fair share of the benefits from natural resources. 
GRD payments will, indeed, not merely improve the conditions of their 
intended beneficiaries, but indirectly also those of their governments and 
compatriots. The rules of the GRD scheme should take advantage of this 
fact. The more effectively a government reduces poverty in its country, the 
more of this country's theoretical GRD share should be allocated to this 
country and the more of this allocated share should be paid out directly 
to its government. In this way the governments and economic elites of the 
29 There are various studies showing how development aid often benefits those capable 
of reciprocation, i.e., the "elites" in the politically more important developing countries. 
In addition, such aid is often focused on expensive high-visibility projects in which firms 
of the donor country can profitably participate. For more on this theme and for relevant 
references, see the cover story "Why Aid is an Empty Promise," The Economist, May 7, 
1994, pp. 13-14 and 21-24. 
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 61 
poor countries have a clear incentive to contribute to the success of the 
GRD regime. This incentive may not always be effective, because at least 
some of those in power will also have an interest in keeping the domestic 
poor ignorant, impotent, dependent and exploitable. The incentive would 
nonetheless shift the political balance of forces in the right direction: 
With the GRD regime, reforms would be pursued more vigorously and 
in more countries, and would also succeed faster and more often, because 
this regime would stimulate a peaceful competition in effective poverty 
eradication among governments and international organizations. 
IV 
These brief remarks on two examples illustrate the following important 
points. (1) The fulfillment of human rights in most countries is strongly 
affected not merely by national factors (culture, power structures, natural 
environment, level of technical and economic development), but also by 
global ones. (2) Explanations in terms of national and global factors do 
not simply compete with each other. Only their synthesis: one explanation 
that integrates factors of both kinds, can be a true explanation. This is 
so, because the effects of national factors are often strongly affected by 
global factors (and vice versa) and because global factors strongly shape 
those national factors themselves (though the inverse influence is gener 
ally slight). (3) The influences emanating from our global order are not 
necessarily the way they are, but are co-determined by relatively minor 
and humanly controllable institutional features (such as the presence or 
absence of the two institutions I have proposed). 
That these facts are so often overlooked is due to the following circum 
stances: In contrast to the often dramatic institutional developments within 
national societies (such as recently in Eastern Europe), change in our 
global order has been glacial. In contrast to the colorful variety of national 
institutional schemes, our global order also has no simultaneous alterna 
tives with which it might be compared. These circumstances explain the 
tendency to perceive this order as natural and inert. Great international 
variations in the fulfillment of human rights tend furthermore to draw 
our attention to factors with regard to which countries differ. Through an 
exhaustive analysis of these factors, it seems, all phenomena relevant to 
the fulfillment of human rights can be explained. And yet, it is not so: 
When human rights are better fulfilled in one country than in another, 
then there must be, of course, some difference that contributes to thisdiscrepancy. But an explanation that merely points to this difference leaves 
many questions open. One question concerns the broader context which 
62 THOMAS POGGE 
determines that national factors have these effects rather than others. It is 
quite possible that in the context of another global order the same national 
factors, or the same international differences, would have quite another 
impact on the fulfillment of human rights.30 Another question concerns 
the explanation of the national factors themselves. It is quite possible that, 
within a different global order, national factors that tend to undermine the 
fulfillment of human rights would occur much less often or not at all.31 
These considerations show that the global level of human rights fulfillment 
cannot be explained in terms of national factors alone. 
Our two examples thus illustrate the empirical background against 
which the global demand of ?28 makes sense. It is the point of human 
30 An analogous point plays a major role in debates about the significance of genetic vis 
a-vis environmental factors: Factors that are quite unimportant for explaining the observed 
variation of a trait (e.g., height, IQ, cancer) in some population may be very important 
for explaining this trait's overall level (frequency) in the same population. Suppose that, 
in some province, the observed variation in female adult height (54-60 inches) is almost 
entirely due to hereditary factors. It is still quite possible that the height differentials among 
these woman are minor compared to how much taller they all would be (67-74 inches) if 
it had not been the case that, when they were growing up, food was scarce and boys were 
preferred over girls in its distribution. Or suppose that we can predict quite accurately, on 
the basis of genetic information, who will get cancer and who will not. It is still quite 
possible that, in a healthy environment, cancer would hardly occur at all. 
31 This point is frequently overlooked 
- 
by John Rawls, for example, when he attributes 
the human rights problems in the typical developing country exclusively to local factors: 
"The problem is commonly the nature of the public political culture and the religious and 
philosophical traditions that underlie its institutions. The great social evils in poorer soci 
eties are likely to be oppressive government and corrupt elites" [John Rawls, "The Law 
of Peoples" in Stephen Shute/Susan Hurley (eds.), On Human Rights (New York: Basic 
Books, 1993), p. 77]. This superficial explanation is not so much false as incomplete. As 
soon as one asks (as Rawls does not), why so many developing countries ("LDC's") have 
oppressive governments and corrupt elites, one will unavoidably hit upon global factors 
- 
such as the ones discussed in my two examples: Local elites can afford to be oppressive and 
corrupt, because, with foreign loans and military aid, they can stay in power even without 
popular support. And they are so often oppressive and corrupt, because it is, in light of 
the prevailing extreme international inequalities, far more lucrative for them to cater to the 
interests of foreign governments and firms rather than those of their impoverished compa 
triots. Examples abound: There are plenty of LDC governments that came to power and/or 
stay in power only thanks to foreign support. And there are plenty of LDC politicians and 
bureaucrats who, induced or even bribed by foreigners, work against the interests of their 
people: for the development of a tourist-friendly sex industry (whose forced exploitation 
of children and women they tolerate and profit from), for the importation of unneeded, 
obsolete, or overpriced products at public expense, for the permission to import hazardous 
products, wastes, or productive facilities, against laws protecting employees or the environ 
ment, etc. It is perfectly unrealistic to believe that the corruption and oppression in the 
LDC's, which Rawls rightly deplores, can be abolished without a significant reduction in 
international inequality. 
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 63 
rights, and of official declarations thereof, to ensure that all human beings 
have secure access to certain vital goods. Many persons currently lack 
such security.32 We can assign responsibility for such insecurity to the 
governments and citizens of the countries in which it occurs; and doing 
so makes good sense. But leaving it at this does not make good sense. For 
the hope that these countries will, from the inside, democratize themselves 
and abolish the worst poverty and oppression is entirely naive so long as 
the institutional context of these countries continues to favor so strongly 
the emergence and endurance of brutal and corrupt elites. And the primary' 
responsibility for this institutional context, for the prevailing world order, 
Ues of course with the governments and citizens of the wealthy countries, 
because we maintain this order, with at least latent coercion, and because 
we, and only we, could relatively easily reform it in the directions indi 
cated. ?28 must be read as a recognition of these points: a clear repudiation 
of the common and ever so convenient conviction that human rights do not 
reach beyond national borders, that the human rights of foreigners (living 
abroad) normally involve no moral claims against me.33 
The institutional understanding of human rights thus tends to under 
mine the self-satisfied detachment with which the governments and 
peoples of the wealthy West tend to look down upon the sorry state of 
human rights in many of the so-called less developed countries: This 
disaster is the responsibiUty not only of their governments and populations, 
but also ours, in that we continuously impose upon them an unjust global 
order instead of working toward a reformed one in which the human rights 
of all could be fully realized.34 
32 This is so no matter which of the available substantive accounts of human rights one 
might endorse. 
33 For a different argument, which attacks the same conviction by appeal to the inher 
ently regrettable incentives it provides, see my "Loopholes in Moralities," Journal of 
Philosophy 89 (1992), pp. 79-98. 
Participants in an institutional order will be differentially responsible for its moral 
quality: Influential and privileged participants should be willing to contribute more to the 
maintenance of a just, or the reform of an unjust social order. Moreover, we must here 
distinguish responsibility from guilt and blame. That we share a negative responsibility 
for an injustice means that we contribute to it causally and that we can and should act 
differently. It does not follow from this that we are also guilty or blameworthy on account 
of our conduct. For there might be applicable excuses such as, for instance, factual or moral 
error or ignorance. 
64 THOMAS POGGE 
V 
Having shown that the global moral thesis embedded in the institutional 
understanding of human rights makes sense, let me now say a little more 
about the advantages of this understanding. Some important advantages 
emerge from the discussion of U\-Uy. The institutional understanding 
is more suitable for singling out the truly essential elements in human 
quality of life and, in particular, avoids any conceptual connection with 
legal rights. Even those who are hostile to a legal-rights culture can share 
the goal of establishing for all human beings secure access to certain vital 
goods (the objects of our human rights). In this section and the next, I will 
try to lay out two further important advantages of the institutional under 
standing through which it can facilitate agreement on the specification of 
that goal and on how to pursue it on the global plane. 
The first of these additional advantages isthat the institutional under 
standing of human rights greatly reduces the gap between civil and 
political rights, on the one hand, and social, economic and cultural rights, 
on the other - a gap that has led to much discord in the UN and elsewhere. 
On the institutional understanding, it is not true that civil and political 
rights require only restraint, while social, economic and cultural rights 
demand positive efforts and costs. Rather, the division of negative and 
positive duties now cuts across the various categories of rights: Every 
person has a negative duty not to collaborate in the avoidable imposition 
upon others of an institutional order in which they lack secure access to the 
objects of their human rights.35 Moreover, when our duty is to fulfill human 
rights in my sense, then there is no straightforward correlation of means 
and ends. In fact, there is no way of telling in advance what the fulfillment 
of any given human right will require. In order to fulfill the classical civil 
right to freedom from inhuman and degrading treatment, for instance, the 
political and economic elite of India may have to do much more than create 
and enforce appropriate criminal statutes. They may also need to establish 
adequate social and economic safeguards, ensuring perhaps that domestic 
servants are literate, know about their rights and options, and have some 
economic security in case of job loss. Conversely, in order to fulfill a 
human right to adequate nutrition, perhaps all that is needed is an effective 
criminal statute against hoarding of, and speculation in, foodstuffs. 
These considerations greatly narrow the philosophical gap between 
those who, like many Western governments, want to highlight civil 
35 
Being negative, this duty is of considerably greater weight than any positive duty we 
may have to seek to improve the conditions of those upon whom such an order is imposed 
by others without our collaboration. 
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 65 
and political rights and those who, like most socialist and developing 
states, want to single out social, economic and cultural rights for special 
emphasis. Let me now show how the institutional understanding of 
human rights would also greatly reduce the practical significance of such 
controversies. 
Suppose that only civil and political human rights are worthy of 
the name, that the social, economic and cultural rights set forth in the 
Universal Declaration (foremost, of course, the much ridiculed right 
to "periodic holidays with pay" of ?24) should hence be repudiated.. 
Conjoining this view with the institutional understanding of human rights, 
we get the moral assertion that every human being is entitled to an interna 
tional order in which his or her civil and political human rights can be fully 
realized. Our global order falls far short in this respect, and does so largely 
on account of the extreme poverty and inequality it reproduces: In most 
developing countries, the legal rights of ordinary citizens cannot be effec 
tively enforced. For many of these countries are so poor that they cannot 
afford properly trained judges and police forces in sufficient numbers; and 
in many of them social institutions as well as politicians, officials and 
government agencies are in any case (partly through foreign influences) so 
thoroughly corrupted that the fulfillment of civil and political human rights 
is not even seriously attempted. In those few developing countries where 
the legal rights of ordinary citizens can be effectively enforced, too many 
citizens are under too much economic pressure, too dependent on others, 
or too uneducated to work on the enforcement of their rights. Thus, even 
the goal of fulfilling only the recognized civil and political human rights - if only they were interpreted in the light of ?28 
- suffices to support the 
demand for global institutional reforms that would reduce global poverty 
and inequality. 
Or suppose that only social, economic and cultural human rights are 
worthy of the name. Conjoining this view with my reading of ?28, we 
get the moral assertion that every human being is entitled to an inter 
national order in which his or her social, economic and cultural human 
rights can be fully realized. Our global order falls far short in this respect: 
More than one billion persons today live in abject poverty, without the 
most elementary education and health care, and without reserves for even 
a minor emergency. Several ten thousand of them, mainly children and 
women, die every day from malnutrition and easily curable diseases. This 
suffering is in large part due to the fact that the global poor live under 
governments that mostly do very little to alleviate their deprivations and 
often even contribute to them. The global poor are dispersed over some 
150 states, which are ruled, mostly, not by general and public laws, but 
66 THOMAS POGGE 
by powerful persons and groups (dictators, party bosses, military officers, 
landlords), often sponsored or supported from abroad. In such states, they 
are unable to organize themselves freely, to publicize their plight, or to 
work for reform through the political or legal system. Thus, even the goal 
of fulfilling only the usual social and economic human rights 
- if only 
they were interpreted in the light of ?28 
- suffices to support the call for a 
global order that would strongly encourage the incorporation of effective 
civil and political rights into national constitutions.36 
I certainly did not mean to contend, in this section, that it makes no 
difference which rights we single out as human rights. I merely wanted to 
show that both the philosophical and practical-political importance of the 
actual controversies about this question would diminish, if human rights 
were understood not in the conventional sense, but in mine: as moral 
claims on social institutions. Even if we have rather diverse views about 
which goods should be placed under the protection of a conception of 
human rights, we will then 
- provided we really care about the fulfillment 
36 A global order could give such encouragement through centrally determined 
economic (trade, loans, GRD payments) and diplomatic privileges and penalties. Stronger 
sanctions, like embargoes and military interventions, should probably be triggered only in 
cases of extreme oppression. 
Some of the governments that profess allegiance solely to social, economic and cultural 
human rights maintain that (legal) civil and political rights are currently unnecessary in 
their country: unhelpful, or even counterproductive (distracting and expensive). But most 
of these governments would, I believe, concede that more extensive civil and political rights 
would often be helpful elsewhere or at other times. The Chinese government, for example, 
would certainly maintain that instituting more extensive civil and political rights in China 
today would not work to the benefit of the Chinese poor, for whom the Party and the 
government are already doing all they can. But the same government might acknowledge, 
if only unofficially, that there are other regions today 
- Africa, perhaps, or Latin America, 
Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Indonesia 
- where more extensive civil arid 
political rights would help the poor and ethnic minorities to fend for themselves. Even more 
privately, it would probably also have to concede that the Chinese famine of 1958-1961, 
whose staggering death toll of nearly 30 million has become widely known only recently, 
could not have occurred in a country with independent mass media and a competitive 
political system. Compare an analogous domestic case. A decent police officer, who cares 
deeply about the suffering caused by crime, may see no good reason why she and herfellow 
officers at her station should not just do everything they can to nail a suspect they know to 
be guilty, without regard to procedural niceties. But would she also advocate a civil order 
in which the police in general can operate without procedural encumbrances? She must 
surely understand that not all officers would always use their greater powers in a decent, 
fair and judicious fashion, and also that some persons with criminal intentions would then 
have much greater incentives to try to join the police force. This example shows that one 
may consistently believe of certain safeguards that their observance should be strongly 
encouraged by social institutions and that they are unnecessary or even counterproductive 
in this or that particular case. 
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 67 
of human rights, and not about ideological propaganda victories 
- work 
together on the same institutional reforms rather than argue over how much 
praise or blame is deserved by this state or that. 
VI 
The other important advantage of the institutional understanding lies in its 
profound implications for the debate about the universal validity of human 
rights. One often hears that human rights are the expression of a provin 
cial, i.e., European, moral conception whose worldwide imposition would 
manifest a new form of imperialism: "Do not the Chinese, the Indians 
and the Zulus have traditions of their own from which they can construct 
their own moral conception 
- 
perhaps wholly without the individualistic 
concept of rights? If you Westerners want to make a conception of human 
rights the centerpiece of your political philosophy and realize it in your 
political institutions, then go ahead, by all means. But do leave others the 
same freedom to define their values within the context of their own culture 
and national discourse." 
Even if such admonitions are often put forward in bad faith,37 they 
nevertheless require a reasoned response. Once human rights are viewed 
as moral claims on global institutions, a novel and much more plausible 
such response becomes available, as follows: When we think of human 
rights as a standard for assessing only national institutions and/or govern 
ments, then it makes sense to envision a plurality of standards for states 
that differ in their history, culture, population size and density, natural 
environment, geopolitical context and stage of development. But when we 
think of human rights as a standard for assessing global institutions, we can 
no longer accommodate international diversity in this way. There can be, 
at any given time, only one global institutional order. If it is to be possible 
to justify this global order to persons in all parts of the world and also 
to reach agreement on how they should be adjusted and reformed in the 
light of new experience or changed circumstances, then we must aspire to 
a single, universal standard which all persons and peoples of this world 
can accept as the basis for moral judgments about our global order. 
Attaining such a common standard for assessing shared social institu 
tions does not presuppose thoroughgoing agreement on all or even most 
37 As when we were told by Ernest Lefevre, former US President Ronald Reagan's 
candidate for Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, that torture is an accepted 
part of Argentinean culture or still are told by other Westerners that child prostitution is 
essential to the Thai way of life. 
68 THOMAS POGGE 
moral issues. It may merely demand that global institutions be so designed 
that, as far as possible, everyone has secure access to a few goods that 
are vital to all human beings. Now it is true that designing social institu 
tions with an eye to a few key values will have collateral effects on the 
prevalence of other values. Global institutions designed to encourage the 
fulfillment of human rights may affect the cultural life in various societies 
or the popularity of the various religions. But this problem of collateral 
effects is simply unavoidable: Any institutional order can be criticized on 
the grounds that some values do not optimally thrive in it. Yet, we can 
mitigate the problem by choosing our moral standard in such a way that 
the institutional order it favors will allow a wide range of values to thrive 
locally. The standard of human rights meets this condition, because it can 
be fulfilled in a wide range of countries that differ greatly in their culture, 
traditions and national institutions. 
The crucial thought here is this: Once we view human rights as moral 
claims on global institutions, there simply is no attractive, tolerant and 
pluraUstic alternative to conceiving them as valid universally. While the 
world can contain societies that are structured in a variety of ways, some 
Uberal and some not, it cannot itself be structured in a variety of ways. If 
the Algerians want their society to be organized as a religious state and we 
want ours to be a liberal democracy, we can both have our way.38 But if the 
Algerians want global institutions to be designed on the basis of the Koran 
and we want them to render secure the objects of human rights for all, 
then we cannot both have our way. With respect to our global institutional 
order, one conception will necessarily prevail 
- through reason or force. 
There is no room for accommodation here, and, if we really care about 
human rights, then we must be wilUng to support the global order they 
favor, even against those who, perhaps by appeal to other values, support 
an alternative world order in which the objects of human rights would be 
less secure. 
We might, of course, understand human rights as a standard for 
assessing only national (institutions and) governments and then accept that 
other states use other such standards. But such "modesty" is pointless, 
For we cannot behave neutrally with regard to the future development of 
the global institutional order. Our political and economic decisions will 
certainly co-determine its development. It is, for the future of humankind, 
the most important and most urgent task of our time to set this develop 
ment upon an acceptable path. It would be entirely irresponsible to deprive 
38 Mutual toleration with regard to this question is at least possible. This is not to say 
that we ought to tolerate the national institutions of other countries no matter how unjust 
they may be. 
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 69 
ourselves of any moral basis for the assessment and reform of our global 
order. And the only such basis that could be both plausible and capable of 
wide international acceptance today is a conception of human rights. 
VII 
According to a widely held opinion, the content of international law 
is settled by actual government conduct and rhetoric as recorded and 
interpreted by the foremost international lawyers. By that criterion, my 
explication of ?28 and my theses about the concept and reach of human 
rights may well be far-fetched. But my ambition here was not to satisfy 
that criterion - but rather to keep alive, against the living examples of 
actual government conduct and rhetoric, an understanding of human rights 
as moral claims on global institutions. Though marginalized, this under 
standing is no less compelling today than it was fifty years ago. And it 
does not rule out viewing human rights also as moral claims on national 
institutions and on the conduct of governments and their officials. 
Department of Philosophy 
Columbia University 
New York, NY 10027 
USA 
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