Human rights are only protected in practice by one’s own sovereign state.

Evidence

The Rights of Man, after all, had been defined as “inalienable” because they were supposed to be independent of all governments; but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 709

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the NationState assumption that rights are guaranteed by membership in a sovereignty, exposing human rights as unenforceable without one.
• XREF: Feeds directly into Arendt’s later ‘the right to have rights’ and connects to Agamben’s bare life and the statelessness literature that Islamophobia readings build on. — 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