Rights, Recognition and Judgment: Reflections on the Case of Welfare and Asylum

This article begins with Marshall's essay on citizenship and its significance in confirming equal social standing, seen here as a precursor to work on rights and recognition. Taylor and Honneth are taken as exemplars of a dialogical perspective, whereby recognition through rights can provide a source of identity formation, though Honneth's approach is broader in scope, being less confined to the issue of cultural rights. This work is argued to be complementary to the status-based approach to rights found in Lockwood's work on civic stratification, and the insights derived from both authors provide the basis for interrogation of a legal case history on UK withdrawal of welfare from in-country asylum claimants. Analysis of this history draws attention to the role of judgment in forging a link between rights and recognition.