Freedom, Security, and the Covid-19 Pandemic

Mardi intime de la Chaire Hoover par Josette Damen (Leiden University).

In the literature on human rights, the standard view is that states are the bearers of primary duties corresponding to human rights, and international institutions are the secondary duty-bearers only. In this talk, I challenge this view by providing a novel, republican, account of the human right to legal citizenship. On this view, it turns out that this entitlement has a primarily international dimension, namely, it grounds a shared duty to naturalise a class of particularly vulnerable individuals which falls primarily on the entire international community, and on single states in a derivative sense only. I then show that those who are owed citizenship as a matter of human rights are not only of the formally stateless people, but also, surprisingly, refugees, some displaced people, and, arguably, some long-term migrants, too. I finally suggest how to improve the current state system so as to realise the human right to legal citizenship.