Second, global justice involves respecting and protecting the human rights of people everywhere, including, if necessary, challenging the authority of states that violate these rights. I looked at the idea of human rights in some detail in Chapter 4, and I argued there that we need to draw a line between basic human rights rights to those conditions that human beings everywhere need if they are to live minimally decent lives and the longer lists of rights that appear in many human rights documents, which are better understood as rights that particular political communities should secure to their citizens. This distinction is important here, because from the perspective of global justice it is only protection ofthe basic rights that matters. We should not intervene in other states simply because they fail to recognize rights that we think are important, such as rights to universal suffrage unlimited religious freedom (we may encourage such states to implement rights on the longer