The thesis that human rights should be an important determinant of foreign policy derives support from certain ideas about what human rights are like. These include the following. Human rights, it is held, are a particularly important class of moral considerations. Their gross and systematic violation represents not just the failure to meet some ideal but rather a case of falling below minimum standards required of political institutions. Second, human rights are of broad application. They apply not only to countries that have recognized these rights in their legal institutions, and not merely to countries that are “like us” in their political traditions or in their economic development, but to virtually all countries. Human rights are not controversial in the way that other political and economic issues are. This is not to say that everyone respects them or that there is full agreement about what they entail. But the central human rights are recognized, for example, in the constitutions of countries whose political principles are otherwise quite divergent. This normal acceptance, and the fact that violations of human rights are not confined to governments of any particular ideological stripe but occur both on the left and on the right, lend support to the idea that concern for human rights is a ground for action that is neutral with respect to the main political and economic divisions in the world.