ABSTRACT
This chapter develops a systematic and multifaceted critique of the view that human rights duties shall be limited to states’ territories. It addresses the conclusions of the previous legal analysis by identifying, reconstructing, and criticizing arguments that could stand behind skeptic positions on extraterritorial human rights obligations—based in theories of moral, political, and legal philosophy and related fields, which are associated with a statist tradition: International Relations Realism, communitarianism, patriotism and special obligations, neo-republicanism, Thomas’ Nagel’s institutionalism (inspired by the ideas of social contract theory), and relativism. Through a reconstruction and a critical discussion of these arguments, it finds that they would need to rely on extreme and ultimately untenable premises. Most centrally, it concludes that there is no rationale for the position that the relation between the territorial state and its residents is of such moral significance that it justifies the systematic disregard for the basic claims outsiders raise. While the political community, its cooperative network, its self-determination, its institutions, its instrumental advantages, its pluralistic nature, and its opportunity for participation are all (morally) relevant in some respect or another, they are not the grounds from which human rights obligations arise—they do not arise from membership but from the individual itself.
