Human rights turn out to depend on having a government willing to enforce them

Watching millions of refugees left stateless after the World Wars, Hannah Arendt argued that 'inalienable' human rights are a fiction the moment someone has no state to claim them from: with no citizenship, a person can be stripped of legal protection, work, movement and even a recognised identity. She called the most basic entitlement that remains the 'right to have rights' — membership in a political community at all.

— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism — 1951
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