Conditional Rights?
Lesezeit: ca. min.
Professor Johan Olsthoorn is a political philosopher at the University of Amsterdam. His work bridges contemporary political theory and the history of political thought. He focuses his research on theories of justice, human rights, punishment, war, and slavery. He pays particular attention to early modern philosophers such as Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant. Johan Olsthoorn is currently a Humboldt Fellow at the University of Regensburg (UR) where he is working with Professor Daniel Eggers, the UR Chair of the History of Philosophy.
We talked with Johan Olsthoorn about his current research, on past and present ideas of human rights.
Johan Olsthoorn. Foto: Nike Liscaljet
Your Humboldt research project focuses on “early modern conceptions of universal rights and human dignity through the lens of their un/conditionality”. Could you explain what this means?
Thank you for your question. Enlightenment philosophers commonly proclaimed human beings to be free and equal by nature, endowed with dignity and natural rights to life and liberty. Yet those same philosophers also regarded it legitimate to punitively enslave grave criminals.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, for instance, argued that wrongdoers can lose “the dignity of a citizen” by their own crime and thus be rightly “reduced to the status of a slave [Sklavenstand]” in punishment. I examine what made Enlightenment conceptions of dignity and universal rights conditional on abstention from crime.
Are you suggesting that Enlightenment philosophers could coherently defend both universal rights and penal slavery because they believed that individuals who commit crimes lose basic rights?
Exactly, that is part of the answer: they believed that people could lose (‘forfeit’) basic human rights by engaging in grave wrongdoing. In my Humboldt project, I examine which conceptual features rendered these rights forfeitable (and thus compatible with penal enslavement). And I also parse the theories of morality and punishment that Enlightenment theorists used to justify rights-forfeiture: stripping criminals of basic rights.
Those philosophical theories, it bears stressing, had clear links to atrocious social realities at the time. Eighteenth-century pro-slavery writers routinely argued that racialized chattel slavery in the colonies was justified in part because (in their vile opinion) the people whom European traders purchased in West Africa had been lawfully enslaved in their home states as punishment for capital crimes.
Are modern human rights no longer capable of being lost? Are human rights nowadays considered as unconditional, in theory and legal practice?
I am not sure. Last year I explored this very question in a small research project funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). Together with a very capable legal research assistant, I analyzed how the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) conceptualizes restrictions on basic human rights of prisoners in their jurisprudence. I focused on ECtHR case law on compulsory prison labor.
To this day, many European states, including Germany, legally require prisoners to perform the work assigned to them, for very little pay. Compulsory prison labour jars with various established human rights. Prisoners are frequently denied the right to strike and unionize. Their social security rights are often heavily curtailed.
How does the European Court of Human Rights justify such restrictions on prisoners’ human rights?
Forfeiture plays a limited role. According to the ECHR, the only fundamental right that can be forfeited is the right to liberty (Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights). Other human rights cannot be lost. However, they can be overridden by morally weightier considerations, or judged inapplicable in carceral contexts. For instance, the Court has ruled that prisoners can rightly be compelled to work in prison until after retirement age for their own good (to prevent boredom).
Furthermore, it declared in 2021 that prisoners have no general right to unionize. That right, the Court reasoned, is indispensable only to persons in an employment relation. And ordinary prison work, being obligatory, is no form of employment. Both ways of legal reasoning allow the Court to affirm that prisoners retain all their human rights. Even if those human rights are rather less extensive and less robust than those of non-detained persons.
European Court of Human Rights - Der Europäische Gerichtshof für Menschenrechte (Film Deutsche Version) | European Court of Human Rights – Factsheets
Your recent edited volume, Justice for Denizens (Routledge, 2026), brings together contributions on human rights and migration. What questions does the book seek to address?
Many states across the world today deny non-citizen residents (‘denizens’) certain political, socioeconomic, and cultural rights granted to every citizen alike. In most countries, only citizens are allowed to vote and run for office. Migrants – especially temporary labor migrants – are frequently withheld socioeconomic rights that all citizens equally enjoy – including various rights to social security, health care, sometimes even freedom of employment. This edited volume examines what, if anything, could make such inequalities between legal rights of citizens and non-citizen residents morally permissible. The book is the outcome of a major four-year research project at KU Leuven.
Is there a link with your research on human rights?
There is. One popular philosophical justification for differentiating legal rights along citizenship status is as follows: Migrants, many theorists argue, should be understood to have voluntarily waived their claims to certain basic legal rights and protections in exchange for being allowed to live and work in the host society. Freely giving up a right is not the same as involuntarily forfeiting a right by committing a crime. Yet both ideas can be and are used to justify withholding basic rights from vulnerable people. That same worrying prospect motivates my research into the conditionality of human rights.
UR © Laura Pritschet
Why did you choose the University of Regensburg to carry out your Humboldt research project?
The Philosophy Department at UR is an amazing place to work on the history of moral and political philosophy. Prof. Eggers and his team have exceptional expertise in moral theories across the Enlightenment period, both in the British and German traditions. My research has benefited greatly from regular conversations with Professor Eggers and Dr Dietrich Schotte, as well as with Professor Eva Odzuck (who holds the UR Chair of Political Philosophy, Theory, and the History of Ideas).
I was lucky to have the opportunity to co-teach the ‘Advanced seminar: Crime and punishment’ with Professor Eggers last semester. We analysed key texts in the philosophy of punishment, from Plato to H.L.A. Hart. Teaching that course improved my understanding of Kant’s theories of punishment and human dignity.
Dr Peter Wiersbinski – with whom I share an office here – deserves a mention too: he has kindly taken on the role of private language instructor, encouraging and correcting my faltering attempts to speak German. In April, I will move to the philosophy department at LMU Munich to study contemporary rights-forfeiture theories of punishment. I plan to return to Regensburg in the summer of 2027, and hopefully many times more in the years after.
Further Information
More about Johann Olsthoorn and the project Justice and Migration at the KU Leuven
Comments
No Comments