Comment by derefr

In the context of a certain society, sure. But those are “rights within that society”, just like your lease is “a lease within that society.” (The pancake recipe is a pancake recipe anywhere; whether or not you can get the ingredients is a separate issue.) Having rights enforced by treaty across most of the world doesn’t mean you have rights if you e.g. crash-land your private plane into a North Korean military base. Or if you get hijacked by pirates in international waters.

In both cases, it’s not really some airy universal human rights that’ll protect you; instead, you have “being the subject of a powerful sovereign nation that has made a promise to its citizens to retrieve them from such peril, probably ultimately because of that nation’s perception of your granted rights as a citizen of that country.” (And, if you’re stateless, you don’t even have that—which is a big reason many nations don’t let you renounce citizenship without already being a citizen of somewhere-else.)

And, more to the GP poster’s point, your rights don’t exist if you wander into the wilderness, get chased by a bear, get backed into a corner, and want to convince the bear not to eat you. The bear will not stop because “you have rights”; those are, at their widest, a “human civil-society” thing. At that moment, you need something else. Something negotiated, probably. (Maybe you can throw him a sandwich and leave while he’s distracted? That’s a negotiation.)