Free speech as a prerequisite for all other rights

If we survey states’ treatment of their citizens throughout the world, it is easy enough to conclude that some perform better while others perform worse, yet in reaching that kind of conclusion we run the risk of paying too little attention to qualitative differences between regimes. Leading intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) claim to monitor the performance of many nations even-handedly, yet they draw no distinction in kind between citizendirected regimes of rights and purely managerial regimes of goods. It is argued here that human rights have no meaning at all unless this essential distinction is drawn, and free speech is the essential element that turns human goods into objects of human rights. Free speech must be recognized not as just another right alongside others, but as a pre-condition for any good to become the object of a legal right.