‘Are Hannah Arendt’s views on human rights of any value today?

Arendt on human rights: She believes in the right to have rights – the right to belong to a
specific country and community HOWEVER she does not believe in the natural rights of man
as specified in the French revolution and American declaration of independence. She does
not believe people have the right to liberty, equality and fraternity the rights of man.

1. She believes all people have the right to citizenship – a citizen is according to Arendt
a fully paid up member of political community with all the associated duties and
responsibilities. (Ancient Greek Polis)
2. She does not believe in a natural equality that exists between citizens, she
furthermore argues that according to nature citizens are unequal. She insists that it
is the law and only the LAW which equalises citizens. However she does attribute
both legal and political equality to citizenship. A basic principle of citizenship is the
rule of law or equality before the law. This idea of equality before the law together
with the equal participation in the deliberation and discussion associated with the
making of law. It is the law which equalises people and the artificial process of
equalization requires a prior commitment from the individuals concerned, a
conventional agreement.
3. Arendt strongly believes everyone has the right to be a citizen but what makes them
citizens. She suggests that what binds people together is not nor should it be
national identity. She criticises nationalism which associates with xenophobia and
aggression towards others which is the principle cause of conflict and war.
4. Arendt’s political community does not rest on one culture language religion or
nationality. Rather is it a community which endorses and embraces plurality and
diversity. Arendt uses the USA as her example she argues that what binds all
Americans is their shared commitment to recognise one another as equals and to
treat each other respectfully despite their differences, according to the principles of
equality which is the basis for constitutionalism and the rule of law.
5. Arendt associates citizenship with a moral, legal and political place in the world. She
also associates is with civic existence. She goes as far as to suggest that not only is it
true that only human beings will be regarded as citizens, but also that only those
who are the citizens of some political society or other will be regarded as human
beings.
6. In her view, in the absence of a world-state or a world-government with the power
to enforce or guarantee them, talk about such rights has been entirely ineffectual.
(Find arendt on a world state or world government) She suggests that people who
talk about natural rights are liberal do gooders and utopian and unrealistic.
7. Arendt does not think a world state is coming any time soon she rather suggests a
‘new law on earth’ A creation of international law by a system of treaties between
individual nation states. The creation of Supra- national political institutions with
state like powers of legal enforcement. International Court of Justice at the Hague
which has the power to charge people with war crimes.
8. Arendt is conventionalist in her approach to human rights. Human rights and natural
rights are not the same thing. Natural rights do not exsist. Human rights do not exsist
naturally but have to be created (usually through law), This requires or would
require discussion, deliberation and agreement between the representatives of
 individual states within the international arena, together with a corresponding act of
commitment to the legal enforcement of international law relating to such rights.

What can Arendt teach us about todays refugee crisis?

Arendt’s views came about after the second world war, when their was a large amount of
stateless people. Arendt writes “An era of calamity has produced ‘homelessness on an
unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth’ – ‘powerlessness has
become the major experience of their lives’ A new group of people Arendt called
‘heimatlosen’ the stateless, emerged form the calamity of war.

Arendt espoused the principle of the right to have rights. Everyone should be allowed to
belong somewhere. Human rights can only be effectively upheld if there is a political
community – a state or a ‘newly defined territorial entity’ that can guarantee that rights will
be respected. Statelessness presented a lack of political membership, without a state to
belong to or a citizenship, the displaced had no state to uphold their rights. Today’s sytem of
international human rights law has moved beyond citizen rights to human rughts obligations
remain tied to state jurisdiction. States are bound to respect human rights onlu when
subjects come under their sovereignty. Therefore there is a gap between obligations owed
to those under the authority of the state and those not yet subject to that authority –
therefore the problem today is not access to citizenship but access to territory.

However it is access to territory which states of the global north have sought to deny
refugees. Rather than seeing refugees as people with rights states have aought t extra
territorialise their border controls in an attempt to prevent asylum seekers from reaching
their territory and subsequently asking for protection.

One such example of states extra-territorially denying entry to refugees is the case of Hirsi
Jammaa  in the European Court of Human Rights, which found that Italy’s forcible return of
boats to Libya was in violation of human rights law. In his concurring opinion, Judge Pinto De
Albuquerque noted that the ‘ultimate question in this case is how Europe should recognise
that refugees have “the right to have rights”, to quote Hannah Arendt.’

As the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers deteriorates around the world, refugee
advocates, such as Amnesty International, continue to argue that ‘seeking asylum is a
human right, which means everyone should be allowed to enter another country to seek
asylum’. However, despite enshrining a right to non-refoulement within the Refugee
Convention and other human rights instruments, the right to seek asylum, outlined in
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, has never been codified into a legally binding
treaty

As the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers deteriorates around the world, refugee
advocates, such as Amnesty International, continue to argue that ‘seeking asylum is a
human right, which means everyone should be allowed to enter another country to seek
asylum’. However, despite enshrining a right to non-refoulement within the Refugee
Convention and other human rights instruments, the right to seek asylum, outlined in the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, has never been codified into a legally binding treaty.
This failure has left a ‘protection gap’: refugees are protected from refoulement once they
come under the jurisdiction of a state, but they may be prevented from accessing a state in
the first place.
In our recent paper, we argue that Arendt’s right to have rights implies a right to enter. 
People seeking asylum must be afforded the opportunity to have their status considered.
Without being able to enter a state capable of securing their claims to safety and dignity,
refugees are not able to access the rights which are guaranteed under international law.
This right to enter can be found in international law through the non-refoulement principle.
When a refugee enters the jurisdiction of a state, the state must first assess their claims
before attempting to return them. If they are indeed found to be refugees they must not be
returned and must be protected. As Judge Albuquerque noted in Hirsi:
Discharging the non-refoulement obligation requires an evaluation of the personal risk of
harm, which can only take place if aliens have access to a fair and effective procedure by
which their cases are considered individually.
The best way, and in fact only real way, to assess a person’s refugee claim adequately is to
do so in the territory of the state. This is the position taken by Professor James Hathaway:
where there is a real risk that rejection will expose the refugee “in any manner whatsoever”
to the risk of being persecuted for a Convention ground, Art. 33 amounts to a de facto duty
to admit the refugee, since admission is normally the only means of avoiding the alternative,
impermissible consequence of exposure to risk.
In this way, the non-refoulement obligation provides a de-facto right to enter, allowing
refugees a right to be heard, a right to be protected, and ultimately, a right to belong.

A right to enter might be seen as a direct challenge to the ability of a sovereign state to
control its borders, and might also raise the spectre of ‘opening the floodgates’. Certainly,
many argue that this right would give rise to increased numbers of asylum applicants.
However, a state’s obligations under international law are not conditioned by pragmatic
circumstances, but are rather founded upon obligations to be upheld.
We might also question this concern about numbers. Germany, after all, has successfully
integrated around one million refugees since receiving them in 2015. The belief that
numbers must be constrained, an un-thought calculus of moderation, is one that needs to be
challenged. 
If we accept that people, as humans, have the right to have rights, states must admit
refugees and assess their claims. Otherwise, those displaced are left to wander the world
with nowhere to belong and, therefore, no state to protect them.

https://medium.com/quote-of-the-week/bloodless-death-thinking-the-refugee-crisis-with-
hannah-arendt-c89aca3efd87

https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-
criminologies/blog/2017/10/what-can-hannah
“The Right to Have Rights” Slavery, Freedom and Citizenship in the Thought of Aristotle,
Hegel and Arendt – Tony Burns

What attitude should be taken by the advanced states of the North and the West towards
displaced persons ?

Seyla Benhabib – wat ought ot be the legal status of “foreigners and aliens, immigrants,
refugees and asylum seekers” who enter their territory. For these questions Arendt is
emphasised especially her idea of the right to have rights. Arendt, 1968 [1951]: 176-78;
Benhabib, 2001; Benhabib, 2003 [1996]; Benhabib, 2004; Benhabib, 2006)

Bloodless Death: Thinking the Refugee Crisis With Hannah Arendt

“Brought up in the conviction that life is the highest good and death the greatest dismay, we
became witnesses and victims of worse terrors than death without having been able to
discover a higher ideal than life.”
- Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees”
Hannah Arendt wrote these words in 1943 in one of her most beautiful and heartbreaking
texts, “We Refugees.” A few paragraphs earlier, with a view to forced displacement and
concentration camps, she warned that contemporary history had created “a new kind of
human being,” one who set a precedent for times to come. Today, over seven decades later,
and in the context of European refugee crisis, the temporary ban on refugees in the United
States, and rising nationalism around the world, the echo of her words resonates powerfully
as a painful prophecy. Painful because it confirms her worst fears, and also because it shows
the most ignominious version of a Europe that is determined to forget its own past.

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The record number of forcibly displacement people reached during the First and Second
World Wars was exceeded in 2015. There are now more than 65 million people who have
fled their countries of origin in conditions of extreme vulnerability. This crisis has revealed
an alarming situation: as the vulnerability of the Other (whether the refugee, the asylum
seeker, the economic migrant) has increased, the feeling of fear on behalf of national
citizens has also increased, and this has brought about the proliferation of anti-immigrant
reactions in a considerable part of Europe and America.
In this context, we witness a challenge to the construction of personal identity in terms of
intersubjectivity in two very different ways: if, on the one hand, migrants who escape from
the violence of war or extreme inequality and poverty are deprived of the possibility of
appearing as unique persons, it is also true that in Europe (and elsewhere around the world)
there is a radicalization of homogeneous identities, which restricts the sense of identity to
the single belonging of the “nation.” The first case involves an exclusion that exposes the
subject to forms of physical violence. In the second case, we confront the reproduction of
identities that promote such exclusions and that may well turn into what Amin Maalouf calls
“murderous or mortal identities.”
In this regard, it has become necessary to rethink the refugees crisis, or migrant crisis in
general, not only in terms of the boundaries of sovereign states and the limitations of
international law, as well as new global responsibilities, but also in terms of violence that
emerges in connection with the destruction of the intersubjective grounds of personal
identity. Only if we take into account relations of violence and identity, will we be able to
understand what “terrors worse than death” Hannah Arendt speaks of in the above
quotations and what, if not life itself, could serve as the highest good.
Arendt builds her thinking about the refugee crisis in response to her own encounter with
totalitarianism. In the preface to the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, she
already points in the direction that her thought will take when she stresses that “human
dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new
law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity.” From that
moment on, Arendt devotes her work to defending the public and political spheres as
spaces of human fulfillment, public spaces in which women and men can appear through
their actions and words and where they can reveal their unique personal identities to
others. From this perspective, “the political” can no longer be conceived as sphere restricted
to “professional politicians,” but as “space of appearance,” one of meeting and mutual
recognition, to which every individual must have potential access.
Arendt argues that “who we are” cannot be disclosed in the private sphere of life, which,
according to her, is tied to the biological needs shared by all humans as members of the
same species. This does not mean that the private realm has no relevance in her theory as a
necessary counterpoint to public space. But to the extent that it is a way of life that is not
based on the power of speech, it does not distinguish one individual from another.
Moreover, we cannot discover a sense of our uniqueness, in terms of an essential identity,
in our interior life. Arendt’s critique of introspection is rooted in a double loss: the loss of
the “common world,” owing to the subject who leaves it to dive within him/herself, but also
the loss of the “self,” since “without direction in the darkness of each man’s lonely heart,
[each of us is] caught in its contradictions and equivocalities.”[i] This is a darkness which, in
Hannah Arendt’ s view, “only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of
others […] can dispel.”[ii]
In order to turn ourselves into someone with a proper name, it is not enough to accept what
has been received by nature. On the contrary it is necessary to participate in political space
through our actions and speech. However, neither these actions and words nor the mere
presence of others is enough, it is also necessary that they actively look and listen. The
configuration of personal identity requires reciprocity between acting and being recognized
as an agent. Thus, living a life of passivity leads subjects to abandon the disclosure of who
they are. But the indifference of spectators to actors renders actors invisible and eventually
excludes them from the political space of appearance.

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The instrumentalization of individuals displaced from the political sphere, who are
recognized only in terms of their functionality in social life, has been a constant throughout
history. Nevertheless, what the figure of the refugee in twentieth century introduced, was
the maximum manifestation of a type of violence that is not exactly instrumental in its tools,
nor in its dynamic. It represents a way to, as Arendt writes, “kill men without any
bloodshed” and very often without a defined aim.
This ontological and existential violence makes people superfluous and disposable precisely
because it does not matter who they are, or even how they can be used to play a
subordinate social role. They become irrelevant for other people and the world. This is what
Arendt means by “worse terrors than death”: The social and political death that occurs in
different grades in everyday life and may well precede extreme situations in which
individuals even become dead to themselves, as happens in extermination camps.
The bloodless deaths of superfluous persons, which open the door to bloody deaths, have
increased dramatically in recent years, placing millions of women and men into what we
may call “spaces of nonappearance”. In this situation, people not only cannot appear as a
recognized biographical life to others, but they also lose the possibility of being seen and
remembered.
The contemporary migrant crisis demonstrates that these symbolic “spaces of nobodies”
coincides to a large degree with those “nobodies” without a physical space in the world. In
“We Refugees,” Arendt gives an account of the tragedy that involves the loss of refugees’
countries and their homes, the loss of their occupations and languages and even the loss of
the naturalness of their reactions, in short, the destruction of their “everyday world.”
However, what had no precedent was that all of these losses were accompanied by the
impossibility of finding a “place in the (common) world.” When this happens, individuals
also lose the possibility of disclosing who they are anywhere. They are in danger of ceasing
to exist in the meaningful world.
The world refugee crisis has given visibility to the miseries of our age, in which the dynamics
of physical and nonphysical violence come together in a tragic confluence. Thus, we see
images of boats full of migrants stranded at sea. We register images of lifeless bodies on the
shore of the Mediterranean Sea, and news of makeshift cemeteries for migrants without
names (such as in Greece); there is news of legislation that promotes expulsion and closes
borders without taking into account the right to apply for asylum, a pillar of international
law. We also register images of people trying to jump border fences and images of what is
known as “unlawful expulsions” or “hot returns”, accompanied, not infrequently, with
police brutality (such as in Spain), as well as images of mistreatment and abuses committed
by “civil” militias who call themselves “immigrant hunters” (such as in Bulgaria).
The news and images that we are witnessing force us to rethink if, as Judith Butler points
out critically, “it is not just that some humans are treated as humans, and others are
dehumanized; it is rather that the dehumanization becomes the production of the
human.”[iii] And this is exactly what seems to characterize the processes of
renationalization that have emerged throughout Europe and now in America. If this is so, we
will have to think, once again, what sense of “human being” we want to (re)construct. The
current situation highlights how the dehumanization of the refugee is always a process of
our own dehumanization: by denying human beings the right to act and to disclose who
they are, we get used to their despair, becoming “morally indifferent” to violence, as
Zygmunt Bauman argues.
If Arendt is right and there are worse terrors than physical death, it is because biological life
is not the highest good. The “common world” that emerges from shared actions and words,
and not the individual life, is the highest ideal to which Arendt dedicated her work. And
precisely this common world vanishes not only for the excluded refugee but also for us,
whenever we do not let him/her take part in it. As Lyotard, inspired by Arendt, writes, “what
makes human beings alike is the fact that every human being carries within him the figure of
the other (…). To banish the stranger is to banish the community, and you banish yourself
from the community.”[iv]
When we are unable to recognize refugees and share with them the world, we make our
shared world narrower; eventually it can disappear. The refugee crisis reflects this erosive
process and, precisely for this reason, it has become a matter of urgency to rethink the
boundaries of “the political”, as well as the limits between inclusion and exclusion, not by
defining and closing margins, but in terms of continuous and necessary variation and
negotiation, which, nowadays, seem to have ceased.