ABSTRACT
Writing of the treatment of stateless persons, refugees and minorities without powerful governments to protect them between the two world wars, which culminated in the genocide of Armenians and Jews, Hannah Arendt famously criticized ‘the efforts of well-meaning idealists who stubbornly insist on regarding as “inalienable” those human rights […] which are enjoyed only by citizens of the most prosperous and civilized countries’. 1 Arendt saw human rights as untenable because they are based on the abstraction of humanity rather than on any possibility of participation, whether democratic or revolutionary, in a concrete political community. She noted that:
The conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships – except they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human. 2
