Human rights are actually citizens’ rights that can be lost without producing absolute rightlessness.

Evidence

This situation illustrates the many perplexities inherent in the concept of human rights. No matter how they have once been defined (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, according to the American formula, or as equality before the law, liberty, protection of property, and national sovereignty, according to the French); no matter how one may attempt to improve an ambiguous formulation like the pursuit of happiness, or an antiquated one like unqualified right to property; the real situation of those whom the twentieth century has driven outside the pale of the law shows that these are rights of citizens whose loss does not entail absolute rightlessness. The soldier during the war is deprived of his right to life, the criminal of his right to freedom, all citizens during an emergency of their right to the pursuit of happiness, but nobody would ever claim that in any of these instances a loss of human rights has taken place. These rights, on the other hand, can be granted (though hardly enjoyed) even under conditions of fundamental rightlessness. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 721

Categorization

• XREF: This deconstruction of ‘human rights’ as actually citizens’ rights is core scaffolding for the reader’s later Islamophobia readings on how legal status produces belonging. — connects to: Human rights covenants cannot protect peoples who lack the power to enforce them — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 226; Rights are exercised through group membership like citizenship, not universal humanity — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 2059
• DEFINE: Distinguishes deprivation of specified rights from the loss of the right to have rights — a foundational distinction.