The chapter addresses the constructive elements of a theory of human rights: a theory of goods (important enough to satisfy a threshold criterium), a political theory of human rights and the normative foundations of the legitimacy of human rights. The chapter develops a political theory of human rights. To this end, it surveys the most prevalent critiques of human rights, including arguments that human rights are inefficient, that they lack instrumental rationality, that they are means to economic disempowerment and that they legitimize illegitimate structures of power. Postcolonial theories of human rights are discussed, as are feminist accounts. The democratic function of human rights is reconstructed. Arendt’s aporia of human rights is the focus of further thoughts. Part of the political theory of human rights is a theory of entrenchment, their role in protecting the political subjectivity of persons and their role in constituting communities. A central thesis is that a political theory of human rights must be firmly anchored in the lessons that the Holocaust taught about the importance of the protection of human rights.

Thee authority of human rights has diminished, even in liberal constitutional systems, international relations, and international human rights law. This enables illiberal democracies to depart from international standards. Majority will as the embodiment of the nation’s existential interest is entitled to overrule the foreign, doctrinal dictates of human rights. In many respects, this ideology corresponds to the antielitist criticism of human rights that is common in anticolonialist literature. However, in illiberal EU member states, the conflict with “international forces” does not extend to denying such rights; rather, it is limited to deceitful reinterpretation, relying on the ambiguities of the current system, pitting rights against rights and inventing new grounds for limitation. Such reinterpretation changes the meaning of existing rights, grants new powers to traditional grounds for limitation, and uses the concept of the state’s positive obligation to promote rights to instead promote the causes of the government, its values, and the interests of organizations allied with it.