The Human Right to Political Participation

World War II set an end to the state-sovereignty doctrine as the main political norm in the global realm. Human rights became the center of a distinctively political and legal agenda for the global order in-formed by egalitarian values. Human rights impose minimal binding standards both on domestic political institutions and the domestic legal order and on international relations and global institutions. Insofar as human rights have, in this way, become part of the re-quirements of political legitimacy, the question arises as to how extensive the list of human rights should be. In the recent debate in philosophy, there has been a tendency to resist inflationary tendencies in the identifi-cation of what counts as a human right and to endorse minimalist lists of human rights. The right to political participation, in particular, although prominent in the original human rights treaties and in contemporary hu-man rights practice, often fails to get support or is even explicitly exclud-ed. Against these views, I want to defend the claim that a right to politica