The Human Rights of Non-citizens 13 and poetic image to the plight of the stateless, making it hard to refuse the urgent predicament of the stateless in our contemporary moment.” Balakian’s works thus “afford a type of recognition cast as discovery that urges us to witness and hence interrupt the ways the past continues into the present. Through this witness, the stateless find new interlocutors with whom to claim belonging.” Coundouriotis argues that this “broadened sense of participation in history” in the reader “links explicitly to an ethos of human rights: everything is pegged on the idea that human rights give legibility to the type of responsible subjectivity that extends belonging to the stateless.” The next three chapters explore other foundations for such claims of future belonging. These contributions pick up the theme of empathy but move beyond, exploring the role of rights, law, and the market in promoting or undermining relationships of belonging. Chapter 8, “‘Either I Close My Eyes or I Don’t’: The Evolution of Rights in Encounters between Sovereign Power and ‘Rightless’ Migrants,” explores cases in which governments have prosecuted individuals who have provided migrants and refugees with basic humanitarian assistance – Cédric Herrou, a French olive farmer who provided assistance to unauthorized migrants in France; two German ship captains who rescued distressed migrants at sea; and Scott Warren, who provided food and water for people trying to cross the Sonoran Desert in the United States. In each of these cases, the individuals who were prosecuted invoked principles higher than the law in justification of their actions. And in some, the courts appeared to recognize such higher principles. In Herrou’s case, Kanstroom explains, the Conseil constitutionnel in France invalidated Herrou’s conviction, invoking the principle of fraternity as a value that must be balanced with state efforts to safeguard public order. Kanstroom’s work illuminates the possibility that principles such as fraternity and solidarity might ground efforts to create relationships across borders, including to compel action on behalf of those who are not a part of our political community. The cases he explores also illustrate the way in which rights can emerge not only via the nation-state but also through the actions of individuals. Rights emerge, according to Kanstroom, “from encounters between raw state sovereign power and ostensibly extra-legal, humanitarian actions for those at the lowest ebb of their power and with the least legal status.” According to Kanstroom, the principle of fraternity “imbues charity with implications of universal obligation.” The cases he examines also provide a basis for giving those bonds legal and not just moral weight. The decision of the Conseil constitutionnel in Herrou’s case recognizes the idea that acting to protect the safety of someone who otherwise would have no claim on us can override the sovereign’s otherwise nearly invincible prerogative in the context of national security. Kanstroom argues that “noncitizens, especially the unauthorized and ostensibly ‘rightless,’ are uniquely positioned to challenge, to critique, and to improve the meaning of law in constitutional democracies and of international human rights.” https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press