Accepted for publication by International Theory.

This paper analyses Jürgen Habermas’s claim that democracy and human rights are co-original and its implications for his internation-al theory. A central argument in his theory, the co-originality thesis suggests that human rights and democracy are not only both funda-mental and mutually supportive, but also ‘equi-primordial ’ and in-ternally related. Reconstructing Habermas’s argument as it has de-veloped over two decades, I argue that his account of constitutional democracy has difficulties accounting for the enmeshment of con-stitutional and international human rights, while his three-tiered model of global governance, in the absence of democratic legitima-tion, amounts to a downgrade of the currently institutionalized prac-tice of international human rights. Instead, I suggest that shifting the focus from ideal global institutions to actual processes of domestic contestation, through which groups appropriate and apply interna-tional legal norms in order to claim their rights, provides a plausible account of the practice of international human rights consistent with the co-originality thesis