Throughout my career, I have published articles, edited collections of articles, and wrote monographs in which I defend the existence of collective rights and the right of peoples to self-determination. To mention only my monographs, I am thinking in particular of La nation en question  (1999), Le pari de la démesure: l’intransigeance canadienne face au Québec  (2001, Richard Arès Prize), De la tolérance à la reconnaissance (2008, CPA Prize and FCSH Prize), A Liberal Theory of Collective Rights (2017), La nation pluraliste (co-written with Jérôme Gosselin-Tapp 2019, CPA Prize), and more recently, Nation et auto-détermination au 21e siècle (2024).

It would be impossible for me to list the vast number of Western English-speaking authors who criticize the very idea of collective rights because they don’t believe in the existence of collective entities, whether they are peoples, nations or ethnic groups. Some seek to derive them from individual rights, the latter being considered more fundamental. According to that view, groups can only derivatively acquire some value, since it is the value that individuals ascribe to their group. There are also authors who, reject collective rights, and only admit ‘group differentiated rights’. There are those who affirm the supremacy of individual rights, while others are willing to speak of collective interests but not of rights. Then, some think that the admission of collective rights leads to reject democracy (because only an elite would presumably be capable of interpreting the interests of the people are as a whole). Others believe that acknowledging these sorts of rights will inevitably lead to the denigration of any judicial review, granted that the latter impose restrictions on the collective values, constraining them by the more important rights of individuals and minorities. Some admit the possibility of limiting individual rights and freedoms, but only by referring to the concept of a ‘free and democratic society’, and without alluding to collective rights. Some argue that the notion of collective rights leads to a very problematic sort of moral collectivism. For some, any reference to the notion of collective rights is a form of communitarianism, or separatism. Finally, accusations of essentialism are always lurking in the background of  the arguments put forward by liberal critics.

Of course, I have answers to all these objections and reservations, but these almost always fall into deaf ears. The reason is that the vast majority of these authors subscribe to moral individualism (or ‘ethical individualism’), that is, the view that individuals are prior to their ends, they are the only ultimate sources of valid moral claims, and autonomy is the fundamental liberal value.

There are not too many books discussing specifically the issue of collective rights. Mine was published in 2017 at McGill Queen’s University Press. It should at least have been mentioned in the article written by Peter Jones for the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy. And yet it is not there. Even worst, I wrote twice to Peter Jones trying to understand why he did not mention my work, and he did not even care to offer me a response. For so many people, like Joseph Raz and Peter Jones, moral individualism is not a comprehensive view that one can question. It plays in their argument the function of a religious principle. I, for one, prefer the approach taken by John Rawls in The Law of peoples. It is the corporate view of peoples, as described by Jones himself. Collective rights, understood as rights that can be ascribed to corporate groups, present no conceptual difficulties whatsoever

Western countries are now confronted with a fundamental violation of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. It is a violation by an ‘allied country’ and it takes the form of a genocide. Fortunately, several legal experts are now speaking out in their defense. The solution cannot be to simply require equal individual rights for all within a single unitary Palestine country. We have to come to terms with the notion of collective rights. Both peoples have a collective right to self-determination: either internal self-determination within a single federal country or external self-determination, for both peoples, each having their own country.

This should not be difficult to understand. The right of self-determination is enshrined in the United nations’ Charter.

It is often said that the law lags behind reality, but sometimes philosophy also lags behind the law.