Rightless people may enjoy freedoms yet remain protected by charity, not right

Evidence

The same is true even to an ironical extent with regard to the right of freedom which is sometimes considered to be the very essence of human rights. There is no question that those outside the pale of the law may have more freedom of movement than a lawfully imprisoned criminal or that they enjoy more freedom of opinion in the internment camps of democratic countries than they would in any ordinary despotism, not to mention in a totalitarian country. But neither physical safety-being fed by some state or private welfare agency-nor freedom of opinion changes in the least their fundamental situation of rightlessness. The prolongation of their lives is due to charity and not to right, for no law exists which could force the nations to feed them; their freedom of movement, if they have it at all, gives them no right to residence which even the jailed criminal enjoys as a matter of course; and their freedom of opinion is a fool’s freedom, for nothing they think matters anyhow These last points are crucial. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 723

Categorization

• DEFINE: Contrasts rightlessness (absence of law-based protection) with mere physical freedom, giving a sharp definitional tool: freedom without legal entitlement is ‘a fool’s freedom.’
• XREF: Directly feeds the Islamophobia field’s account of statelessness and juridical exclusion; connects to Agamben’s later notion of bare life and to the rightless as those outside legal protection. — 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