Human rights enforcement depends entirely on sovereign state power.

Evidence

Whatever its early history may be, today only a strong, secular state can enforce natural right and its successor as the law—whether that relates to the treatment of persons or of property. One does not have to subscribe to an Austinian definition of law in order to recognize that it is a matter of critical importance whether or not a state concedes that it has violated rights and restores them, or restores rights that have been violated within its own domain (or coerces a weaker state to the same end), or it legally endorses rights vindicated by other civil powers (trade unions, women’s movements, ethnic groups, and so forth). Human rights depend, as Hannah Arendt long ago pointed out, on national rights—that is, rights that constitute, protect, and punish one as the citizen of a nation-state. This also means that the state has the power to use human rights discourse to coerce its own citizens—just as colonial rulers had the power to use it against their own subjects. In defending its citizens’ human rights it is only the state that can legally threaten to punish violators. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 654

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Arendt’s ‘Rights of Man and Rights of the Citizen’ on the right to have rights, and echoes the reader’s interest in state power and coercion.
• SEED: An essay angle: human rights discourse as a coercive tool the state wields against its own citizens.