The focus of this blog is the living conditions of un-documented migrants in Sweden, UK and the world. Posts here will be about the situation of undocumented persons in the contemporary world, and our research activities in this field. Theoretically, our research draws on philosopher Hannah Arendt’s observation that rights can be realised only in a political community where humans are not judged by the characteristics defined to them at birth but through actions and opinions. In the book The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt recognizes the importance of being part of a community to get access to human rights. Perhaps her most famous quote is the following:
“We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerge who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation.”
The above observation, formulated in the aftermath of the World War II, entail that the modern conception of human rights is too weak to provide for real protection of all human beings (which is the basic idea). This is particularly evident in relation to the living conditions of migrants without a residence permit in the contemporary world. Having nothing left but an appeal to their rights as human beings, stateless people, in the nineteen-fifties as well as today, are barely recognizable as humans. As a consequence of this, Arendt stressed, we become aware of the link between being a member of a political community and being able to claim protection of rights. Hence, one fundamental human right is the most important, namely the right to have rights, i.e. the right to be part of a community beyond the nation state.
As I understand her, one aim of Arendt was to help establish philosophically and securing politically human rights. She wants to give us an idea of the foundations of human rights without reference to god, the rationality of nature, history or the self-evidence of reason. In The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt states that man has become as emancipated from nature as eighteenth-century man was from history, and “…the essence of man can no longer be comprehended in terms of either category.” If nor god, history or nature constitutes the foundation of human rights humanity itself must guarantee the right to have rights, i.e. the right of every individual to belong to humanity. This is an inescapable fact but, says Arendt, it is by no means certain whether it is possible.
I am not convinced that Arendt succeeds in the ambition to frame a non-arbitrary foundation of human rights but she does have a point stating that one step in this direction is to recognize the idea of common responsibility:
“The idea of humanity … has the very serious consequence that in one form or another men must assume responsibility for all crimes committed by all men, and that eventually all nations will be forced to answer for the evil committed by all others.”
Anna Lundberg