Civil-rights claims must run through the violating state, while human rights bypass it

Evidence

Whenever you are in a civil-rights struggle, whether you know it or not, you are confining yourself to the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam. No one from the outside world can speak out in your behalf as long as your struggle is a civil-rights struggle. Civil-rights comes within the domestic affairs of this country. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 687 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

I stress that my concern here is not to ascribe blame—to argue that Southeast Asian governments or Somali civilians were innocent victims of a conspiracy. In this chapter, unlike the previous one, my concern is not with cruelty as such but with how, in a secular system like human rights, responsibility is assigned for it. I point to a basic assumption about “the human” on which human rights stand: Nothing essential to a person’s human essence is violated if he or she suffers as a consequence of military action or of market manipulation from beyond his own state when that is permitted by international law. In these cases, the suffering that the individual sustains as citizen—as the national of a particular state—is distinguished from the suffering he undergoes as a human being. Human rights are concerned with the individual only in the latter capacity, with his or her natural being and not civil status. If this is so, then we encounter an interesting paradox: the notion that inalienable rights define the human does not depend on the nation-state because the former relates to a state of nature, whereas the concept of citizen, including the rights a citizen holds, presupposes a state that Enlightenment theorists called political society. Human rights, including the moral rules that bind humans universally, are intrinsic to all persons irrespective of their “cultural” make-up. Yet the identification and application of human rights law has no meaning independent of the judicial institutions that belong to individual nation-states (or to several states bound together by treaty) and the remedies that these institutions supply—and therefore of the individual’s civil status as a political subject. … The idea of a human being having rights independent of his civil status has a complicated history going back to the idea of natural law in Latin Christendom and its roots in readings of Roman law. The interesting thing about this story is how the essence of the human subject comes to be constituted in terms of inalienable rights, and how that informs the subject’s secular status. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 626 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Ironically, it was the moral revulsion against the legal atrocities of the Nazi state that led, after World War II, to a renewed interest in the old natural law tradition, and that contributed in a major way to the framing of The Declaration. (It was the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal that retrospectively introduced the notion of crimes against humanity into international law.) But the condemnation of a particular state’s system of law and of its behavior in terms of norms entirely external to them led not to a recognition that nonstate norms have authority as such. They led instead to the formulation of sacred laws that must ultimately depend, as laws, on their recognition by states. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 671 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: States invoke human rights to justify denying rights to suspects — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 318; Civil rights claims remain within one nation’s jurisdiction, unlike human rights claims. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 687; Human rights law is incoherent without the nation-state it purports to transcend — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 626 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Civil rights claims remain within one nation’s jurisdiction, unlike human rights claims. #corroborates (1.00) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 687
• Human rights law is incoherent without the nation-state it purports to transcend #complicates (0.85) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 626
• The human-rights turn re-sacralized state law instead of empowering nonstate norms. #complicates (0.78) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 671
• Human rights discourse collapses social justice into state-enforced law. #complicates (0.74) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 670
• States invoke human rights to justify denying rights to suspects #complicates (0.72) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 318