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Yael Tamir argues that the notion of collective rights, understood as entitlement bestowed on a group rather than the individuals that make up a group, should be rejected in principle. According to Tamir, the notion of a collective right is meaningless, because groups are not moral agents; it is unnecessary, because most morally relevant interests to be protected by such rights can be protected by individual rights, and those that cannot are better taken care of by contingent policies or institutional arrangements that are not couched in a discourse of rights; and it is dangerous, a threat to the individual rights of members and non‐members alike.

Investigates the connection between collective rights and individual rights, and challenges the liberal hypothesis that there is an inherent conflict between the two. It argues the need to distinguish between two meanings of ‘collective rights’, which can refer either to the right of a group to limit the liberties of members in the interest of group solidarity or purity (internal restrictions), or the right of a group to limit the powers of a majority to curtail the interests of minorities (external protections). It argues that the latter need not conflict with individual liberty, and indeed that what distinguishes a liberal theory of minority rights is precisely that it accepts some external protections for ethnic groups and national minorities while being very sceptical of internal restrictions.

Once the EU developed its active leverage, noncompliance with EU membership requirements became visible and costly for governments in candidate states. This chapter illustrates the effectiveness of the EU’s active leverage in compelling Hungary to moderate its foreign policy towards neighbouring states, and it explores the EU’s vigorous attempts to improve the treatment of ethnic minorities in Romania and Slovakia. The EU’s active leverage was usually ineffective in directly pressuring ruling elites in Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovakia to change key domestic policies. But the relationship between the EU and credible future members gradually changed the domestic balance of power in illiberal states against rent-seeking elites by making the political systems more competitive. It did so by working through society to change the information environment and the institutional environment to the advantage of more liberal political forces. This helped undermine the ‘democratic monopoly’ that had allowed rent-seeking elites to use ethnic nationalism and economic populism to win and maintain power. In states where no united, organized liberal opposition existed before 1989, the EU’s active leverage—in cooperation with other international actors and in synergy with domestic forces—helped to create one, shaping the more liberal political parties that took power in 1996 in Romania, in 1997 in Bulgaria and in 1998 in Romania.

This chapter explores the concept of territorial rights. It argues that the primary incidents of territorial rights are rights of jurisdictional authority over persons and resources, while the contingent incidents (incidents that could not hold and the right would still exist) are rights of ownership over resources and rights regarding residency and immigration. An analysis of territorial rights must also include an account of what kind of agent may hold territorial rights. This chapter argues that the agent must be a collective of persons and should not be understood as a state or as an individual.

This chapter provides an historical and systematic account of the human rights of religious associations. Against the background of diverse ways in which international law engages with religion, it traces the development from individual to collective rights in the Krishnaswami Report, under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1966 and other international and regional instruments, and in the work of the Human Rights Committee and the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief among others. However, the main focus is on the contribution of the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights, the case law of which on religious associations is extensively covered and subjected to critique in terms of ten categories of right. It concludes that in spite of a new and substantial body of emerging European human rights law, some other international commitments are more extensive.

This chapter argues that national minority rights may be political cluster rights backed up by political institutions. It examines the prevailing use of collective rights in public international human rights law and the tensions that it encounters in this structure of law. The chapter explains why co-nation rights are technically institutional rights rather than human rights and suggests that the individualism–collectivism dichotomy has a central place in our search for the understanding of collective rights.

Collective rights, it is argued, are necessary to protect and promote the interests of members of minority groups. This latter claim is supported by theoretical and political arguments. The former suggest that unless bestowed upon a collective, the existence of some rights cannot be justified, while the latter assert that unless granted to a collective, some rights cannot be protected. This chapter argues that one can, and should, justify all rights in terms of individual rights. This does not imply that all the rights referred to as ‘collective rights’ can be reduced to individual rights. It is important to distinguish between rights and the political arrangements that ought to be put in place in order to defend and promote rights; the former ought to reflect the nature of moral and political agents, whereas the latter must take into account contingent limitations embedded in particular social and political circumstances. This chapter also discusses communal survival and violations of individual rights, collectives and associations, whether collectives can be rights-holders, and whether collective rights are indispensable.

This chapter provides a general overview of the argument of this book. It explains how claims which are made for entitlements, resources, power, or opportunities on the basis of what is important to a group's identity have a legitimate place in public decision making. It shows how failure to recognize this fact has led to multicultural backlash and to confusion surrounding Indigenous claims to collective rights. Public institutions need better guidance to assess identity claims fairly. The chapter explains the basic threefold justification for an identity approach that can address identity claims in a fair and feasible manner. The approach is grounded in the need (1) to treat different peoples with respect, (2) to develop a means by which institutional humility can be secured and institutional biases can be more readily detected, and (3) to respond pragmatically to the current surge in identity claiming.

This chapter examines collective ownership of the earth as a ground of justice by focusing on Hugo Grotius's De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres (DJB, Three Books on the Law of War and Peace, 1625), which addresses questions of global scope in a way that develops a standpoint of global public reason. The chapter first explains how reflection on collective ownership enters Grotius's work before discussing how Grotius introduces his views on natural law as well as the collective ownership status of the earth. It then explores how, according to DJB, a morally legitimate system of private ownership law could develop against the background of persisting natural collective ownership rights. It also describes how Grotius uses humanity's collective ownership to constrain what people may do with resources and spaces.

The fundamental dilemma in recognising national minority rights — whether post-1919, post-1945, or post-1989 — concerns that gap which continues to exist between those principles of order that affirm the territorial integrity and sovereignty of existing states and those principles of legitimacy that affirm the right of all nations to independent statehood. The main public policy problem in adopting international standards of national minority rights has unavoidably centred upon the need to determine whose rights — those of states, national minorities, or individuals — should have priority in any given situation where they might come into conflict. This chapter assesses the extent to which these European initiatives of the period 1990–1995 enlarged upon previous international requirements for state conduct towards national minorities. The focus is on whether the measures adopted accorded priority to the rights of states or to the rights of national minorities, and why.

This concluding chapter discusses what can be gleaned from the history of the Second Amendment. It is argued that the most important consequence of reading the Second Amendment by its original understanding is that it demonstrates that both the modern collective rights and individual rights interpretations of the Second Amendment do great harm to the text, effectively erasing half of its original meaning. The current debate over the Second Amendment ought to serve as a wake-up call to Americans, and both sides in this debate need to back away from extremist rhetoric.

In order to properly understand whether or not—and, in case, to which extent—human rights standards are universal, it is useful to analyse how the idea of human rights developed within the different human societies. In Chapter 2, a brief look at pre-colonial societies is sufficient to show that the idea according to which human rights would be a creation of Western philosophers in the Age of Enlightenment is inaccurate, human rights having contextually developed in virtually all human communities since ancient times. At the same time, human rights have been shaped within all the said communities according to heterogeneous models, determined by their different cultural specificities. These differences are reflected in the present characterization of human rights, showing that the Western model of rights represents only part of the picture in the contemporary world.

It is hardly clear which rights should qualify as political, much less which political rights should be deemed indispensable in times of stress. In a narrow sense, political rights are distinct from civil rights and from social and economic rights. Of the fifty three Articles of the United Nations' International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, only two deal strictly speaking with political rights. Article 25 grants citizens an individual right to political participation that boils down to the right to vote and the right to be eligible for elective office. The collective right seems as broad as the individual right seems narrow, but if one places the latter in its proper context it only remains meaningful so long as it is inextricably linked to a significant bundle of other rights. In the end, pluralism does not furnish a list of political rights for each of the three different times discussed throughout.

Cultural difference provides the key context in which indigenous peoples' claims to self-preservation and flourishing arose. Existential threats to their survival prompted a global movement, starting in the 1970s, that resulted in widespread changes in domestic laws and a return of the First Nations to the table of actors in international law. This chapter discusses culture as a collective phenomenon and the attendant need to safeguard it through individual and collective rights. It highlights indigenous peoples' claims and the response of states by treaties and other international instruments, culminating in the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It ends with a discussion of the Declaration's legal effect and the extent to which it reflects customary international law rights to self-government, culture, and land as found in the International Law Association's authoritative Resolution No 5/2012 on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The doctrine of human rights has been closely associated with rights of collective self-determination in both international law and moral thinking. How should we conceive their relationship? Can the first subsume the second? Many commentators think not since human rights are rights of individuals while rights of collective self-determination must be group rights. This chapter presents a conception of group rights as collective rights and examines the relationship between group rights so conceived and collective goods. It argues that some collective rights can be human rights and these include the collective right to the collective good of self-determination. The link between human rights and peoples’ rights to self-determination is not however complete. The doctrine of human rights can incorporate the principle that the determined should also be the determiners but it cannot tell us how humanity should be divided into peoples each of whom is entitled to be self-determining.

This chapter examines how the Philippine Women's Centre deploys the language of rights in practice. It traces how certain boundaries naturalise domestic workers' unequal access to rights and considers whether rights discourse is itself a flawed and limited resource that throws responsibility for social inequality onto individuals and deepens the regulatory reach of the state. A close study of the Philippine Women's Centre's nimble use of rights discourse suggests the limits of a purely theoretical critique of rights. Four spatial arguments about rights are advanced: we inhabit multiple spaces and multiple discourses and this allows important room for manoeuvre; human rights is itself a fragmented discourse that has emerged from and is deployed in particular ways in specific geographical contexts; geographical scale can be exploited in productive ways; and universal rights are an ‘empty space’ that can be used to reveal exclusions and acquire concrete rights.

Another developing relational discourse has been the increasing emphasis, especially in the international organisations, on rights. Poverty is about relationships, and rights are rules that govern such relationships; Sen links the idea of poverty directly to entitlements. Discussions of citizenship, legal rights, collective and human rights have become part of the armoury of anti-poverty campaigns.

The record of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in dealing with indigenous peoples is treated at many points in the present work. A notable feature is the intellectual journey travelled between ILO Convention 107 and Convention 169, from the despair at the end of history to a new affirmation of indigenous presence and continuity. Many indigenous groups are wary of Convention 169 and contemptuous of 107. Neither Convention has been widely ratified, but the influence of ILO standards in the general consciousness of indigenous rights cannot be overestimated. The underestimation of 169 in particular may be for the wrong reasons and damaging to indigenous interests. While groups may be disappointed by its failure to address self-determination through evasive wording, the text of the Convention is radical by the standards of the human rights canon. In particular, its commitment to collective rights is remarkable and thoroughgoing. The Convention is strong on land rights and resources, customary law, education and participation.