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Sedition refers to the uttering or writing of words intended to bring the sovereign state into hatred or contempt, to urge disaffection against the Constitution or democratically elected government, or the attempt to procure change in government by unlawful means. Modern sedition laws, such as those enacted in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States and The Council of Europe target types of speech advocating violence against the state, in the form of religious sermons preaching violent jihad or glorifying acts of terrorism, although they have the potential to cover much more than this

In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas articulates a system of rights, including human rights, within the democratic constitutional state. For Habermas, while human rights, like other subjective rights have moral content, they do not structurally belong to a moral system; nor should they be grounded in one. Instead, human rights belong to a positive and coercive legal order upon which individuals can make actionable legal claims. Habermas extends this argument to include international human rights, which are realised within the context of a cosmopolitan legal order. The aim of this paper is to assess the relevance of law as a mechanism for securing human rights protection. I argue that positive law does make a material difference to securing individual human rights and to cultivating and augmenting a general rights culture both nationally and globally. I suggest that Habermas' model of law presents the most viable way of negotiating the tensions that human rights discourse gives rise to: the tensions between morality and law, between legality and politics, and between the national and international contexts of human rights protection.