Statelessness Working Paper Series No. 2016/06 such a right has often been understood as the right to citizenship. Justice Warren, for example, claimed that “[c]itizenship is man’s basic right, for it is nothing less than the right to have rights”.27 Arendt writes: We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation.28 Though this is expressed as two rights in the above quote, they have generally been understood to be one fundamental right; indeed, the later title of this section was ‘There Is Only One Human Right’.29 They can be identified as one right because, for Arendt, speech and action (one’s ‘actions and opinions’) are only meaningfully possible in the political community. Action “corresponds to the human condition of plurality”, and plurality itself is the “conditio per quam”30 (sufficient condition) of political life. Arendt does not mean by this that one literally cannot act outside of the political community, but rather that action, as distinct from labour and work in the Arendtian framework, takes place between people; it is the “political activity par excellence”.31 The right not to be excluded from the political community, as the right to have status as a human who can meaningfully act in the public sphere, is then the right which is denied to stateless persons. The protection of this (emergent32) right is for Arendt the solution to the ‘aporia’ of human rights; it functions as a condition for the inclusion into the political sphere, where rights function. Some critics, however, have taken issue with the idea that one can be ‘outside’ of the political community. Rancière accuses Arendt of “extolling the brightness of the political sphere of appearance against the ‘dark background of mere givenness’”.33 Whereas for Arendt, “it is only by virtue of participating in politics that a shared reality is constituted”,34 for Rancière, the idea that there is a sphere outside of politics is inconceivable; the idea of such a realm “relates less to reality and more to Arendt’s rigid opposition between the realm of the political and the realm of private life”.35 Though interesting, this debate is not of great relevance for taking alienation from the political community to be a serious concern in how we respond to statelessness. Arendt’s opposition between the public and private sphere is not necessary for the recognition that stateless persons are, in virtue of their statelessness, practically excluded from the political community. In the same way that Arendt’s concern that human rights are predicated on the nation-state system does not need to deny the normative significance of human rights, the alienation of stateless persons from the political community, in terms of their practical inability to have their voice heard, is of importance regardless of whether stateless persons are ‘outside of the political’ in a meaningful sense. Gibney writes: 27 Justice Warren, in Perez v. Brownell, 356, 64 (U.S. Supreme Court 1958), 356. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 297. 29 This is in the German version of the text, as ‘Es gibt nur ein einziges Menschenrecht’, as is noted in Menke, ‘The “Aporias of Human Rights” and the “One Human Right”’, 741. 30 Arendt, The Human Condition, 7. 31 Ibid., 9. 32 One criticism of Arendt’s ‘right to have rights’, is that it cannot be said to be a ‘right’, since rights only function within the political sphere for Arendt, and since stateless persons are precisely outside of such a sphere. Given that the focus of this paper is to examine the relevance of Arendt’s argument, a full analysis of the nature of rights in Arendt’s political philosophy takes us beyond its scope. In brief, Arendt’s understanding of the ‘right to have rights’ conceives of it as an ‘emergent’ right which is generated under the condition of plurality, through what she terms ‘natality’. For a more complete analysis, see Benhabib, ‘Feminist Theory and Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Public Space’; Birmingham, ‘The AnArchic Event of Natality and the “Right to Have Rights.”’ 33 Rancière, ‘Does Democracy Mean Something’, 55. 34 Schaap, ‘Enacting the Right to Have Rights’, 14. 35 Rancière, ‘Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’, 64. 28 4