Inalienable human rights prove unenforceable for anyone outside a sovereign state

Evidence

The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable—even in countries whose constitutions were based upon them—whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state. To this fact, disturbing enough in itself, one must add the confusion created by the many recent attempts to frame a new bill of human rights, which have demonstrated that no one seems able to define with any assurance what these general human rights, as distinguished from the rights of citizens, really are. Although everyone seems to agree that the plight of these people consists precisely in their loss of the Rights of Man, no one seems to know which rights they lost when they lost these human rights. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 714

Categorization

• XREF: Core building block for the reader’s scaffold on statelessness and how citizenship grounds rights; directly prepares the Islamophobia field’s account of exclusion. — connects to: The Rights of Man were only ever enforced as national rights, not universal ones; The legal order presupposes every person must belong to some deportable territory; The inalienable rights of the abstract individual were immediately fused with national sovereignty (+9 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that no one can define which rights are lost when human rights are lost is a genuinely dense knot about the vacuity of contentless rights.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 714

Broader Connections

• International human rights rulings alone cannot force compliance without sustained monitoring and pressure #corroborates (0.82) — , The Rod and the Child, 11171
• The inability to treat stateless people as legal persons threatens all citizens’ legal equality #expands (0.80)
• Human rights treaties succeed or fail over decades, not at ratification #corroborates (0.80) — , The Rod and the Child, 7631
• Restoring human rights requires restoring national rights, not abstract declarations. #expands (0.78)