Abstract

In his recent book, The Idea of Human Rights, Charles Beitz claims that we should reject the human right to democracy in favour of the less demanding right to collective self-determination. On this account, citizens are entitled to basic civil and political rights, and their interests are represented by a hierarchical regime that defers to a conception of the common good in decision-making processes. However, this claim undermines his subsequent defense of the human right to nondiscrimination, because systematically enforced political inequalities are fundamentally discriminatory. In this paper, I explore and defend two claims: first, Beitz's rejection of the right to equal political participation is inconsistent with his defense of the human right to nondiscrimination; second, we should reconcile this inconsistency by maintaining that there ought to be a right to both nondiscrimination and political equality. In defending the second claim, I argue that equal political rights may protect a fundamental human interest and thus merit the status of a human right. I then argue that democratic institutions can be instrumentally linked to the effective protection of human rights. Further, without a constitution and political accountability mechanisms, disenfranchised citizens are dependent on the contingent benevolence of the ruling elite for the assurance that their basic liberties will be protected over time. Ultimately, even if hierarchical regimes protect basic liberties in practice, nondemocratic regimes violate the human right to nondiscrimination by systematically denying certain groups equal political rights