ABSTRACT
This chapter develops the view that the status of a subject of human rights is connected with the possibility of future contemporaries and that ultimately all future human persons have this status respected too. This view differs from but is compatible with (i) the direct approach, which asserts that future people have basic rights against us, and with (ii) chain style approaches, which hold that we have long-term obligations corresponding with specific interests or rights of contemporaries. It is argued that the chain of status argument is not addressed by objections to the direct and the chain style approaches.
