1. I should repeat that the observations I rely on here are generalisations that allow of exceptions, exceptions which indirectly prove the same general lessons to which I draw attention. For example, some rights invest their holders with control over objects that, far from being valuable, are harmful to them. Here, the right is valuable for its point is to provide the right-holders with control over the source of harm, which enables them to neutralise it.
2. For longer-standing human rights treaties of the UN Charter era, see the ICESCR, ICCPR, CERD, CEDAW and CAT. For post-Cold War treaties, see the MWC and the PWDC. In formal terms (date of conclusion and opening for signature of the treaty), the CRC falls exactly on the divide between these two periods, although its formulations would have been largely settled in negotiations prior to the advent of the present ‘emerging world order’ period. I have elaborated on the critique of the traditional theory and explained in greater detail my own approach in Joseph Raz, ‘Human Rights without Foundations' in Samantha Besson and John Tasioulas (eds),The Philosophy of International Law(Oxford University Press, 2010) 321.
3. Whichever way the explanation of the grounds of the right is to be augmented it will rely on empirical generalisations about social and political conditions, which, like all such generalisations, are not without exceptions. It is part of the burden of the explanation that the exceptions are not of a character to undermine the existence of the right.