, and two anonymous referees and the editors at Ethics for their very helpful comments. I am especially grateful to David Copp and Derek Parfit for their extremely extensive and astute comments on several drafts. 1. I am using the term 'impartial' in a substantive sense, to denote the claim that each person's interests have equal moral weight. I will focus on Kantian contractualism rather than Gauthier's alternative version of contractualism because, as Brian Barry has forcefully argued, in Justice as Impartiality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), Gauthier's version does not incorporate impartiality in this substantive sense.

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I argue that our traditional conception of the duties imposed by human rights is unable to acknowledge the nature of many contemporary human rights violations. The traditional conception is based on a broadly deontological view according to which human rights impose primarily negative and perfect duties, and these duties are held to be specific prohibitions on certain kinds of actions (duties not to kill, assault and so on). I argue that given this conception of the nature of the duties imposed by human rights, not only claims to aid, but in addition, claims against many of the most serious and prevalent contemporary active harms will not count as genuine human rights claims. These harms increasingly result from extremely complex causal chains involving the behaviour of a huge number of agents, few or none of whom can be singled out as responsible for a serious harm to any specific victim. Institutional structures can have just as central a role to play in specifying and allocating responsibility for fulfilling many of the negative duties imposed by human rights as the positive duties. These structures can therefore be equally important in the realisation of both kinds of rights. Before the necessary institutional reforms have taken place, both kinds of rights are equally genuine, and ground the imperative of justice to reform existing social institutions.

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