Who has primary responsibility to uphold, protect, and respect human rights? Individuals, governments, or other entities? Why/why not?
In this essay I will show that states have primary responsibility to uphold, protect and respect human rights. I consider that individuals have unlimited interests, finite resources, and varied capabilities, and that this produces an inherent tension which requires systematic facilitation to avoid a state of war. I say that this is the reason we have states, to provide the facilitation and seek to satisfy citizens' interests. I argue that human rights are a high priority subset of individual interests. I show that these special interests, human rights, are subject to the same pressures of finite resources and varied capabilities as other interests, and furthermore are too important not to be secured, so individuals must not bear primary responsibility for human rights duties. I consider that a worldwide body could bear primary responsibility for human rights, but reject this notion on account of it the inefficiencies and difficulties with transferring the necessary knowledge, resources, and legal powers from states. I settle on the notion that states are the bodies most appropriate to take primary responsibility for human rights. I consider the problem of rogue and weak states who do not uphold this primary responsibility. I contend that states have a secondary responsibility to pressure states that fail to protect their citizen's human rights. I evaluate two problems of states exerting this pressure on rogue and weak states - violating state sovereignty and worsening human rights violations, and endorse Luban's (Luban: 1980) perspective that extreme pressure is justified only when a state violates its citizens most basic human rights in a systematic and sustained way, in which case the state is actually illegitimate and has forfeited sovereignty rights. When citizens' most basic rights are not met, intervention that may...