Rights are practical reasons such that everyone, everywhere, although not in all circumstances has as a duty to recognise in the course of directing his or her actions and deliberations. Rights override contrary considerations of the public interest. Rights as peremptory reasons are universal. They apply to all persons, all institutions and all states, although they are not relevant to all sets of circumstances where practical questions arise. This essay argues that the universality claim is a claim concerning two different domains: first, the domain of the political and, second, the domain of foreign policy. The domain of the political gives us a theory of political rights as we find them in Rawls’ Political Liberalism. The domain of foreign policy gives us a theory of human rights as we find them in Rawls’ Law of Peoples. Both are distinct from a third domain, that of the moral relations of persons, where rights also are seen to have a bearing. We have therefore political rights, human rights, and moral rights. Only the first two enjoy universality. The distinction between the moral, the political and the international domains is crucial to the success of the claim to universality.nThe idea of universality sits uneasily with the interest theory of rights but is helped by an understanding of rights in terms of a sophisticated will theory and an associated theory of public reason. Finally, Rights can be much better understood, if they are linked to certain traditions of law and legal reasoning. Rights have a dimension of weight. They depend on judgment. They are not communications of requirements but stages in practical deliberation. The universality claim has much better chances of being true if it is a claim about legal rights as reasons in precisely this sense. Legal rights with moral content of course, but also rights that are institutional as part of an established deliberative technique.
