What does it mean to have legal standing?
It means you exist in the eyes of justice. You can be heard. You can challenge harm. You can seek remedy. You have a name that law recognizes, a voice that carries weight, and access to the systems designed to protect you. Without standing, you become a non-person—someone the law looks through rather than at. Your suffering doesn’t register. Your grievances don’t count. You exist in the world but not within the protections that make survival possible.
This is not a technical legal distinction. It is the difference between mattering and not mattering under the structure of collective life. To deny someone standing is to declare them unworthy of protection. It is to say: your dignity may be inherent, but we will not defend it. You may be conscious, but we will not hear you. You may suffer injustice, but we will not acknowledge the harm. This is not neutrality. It is abandonment dressed as procedure.
Legal standing is where dignity meets enforcement. Dignity alone cannot prevent harm if there is no mechanism to challenge it, no pathway to remedy, no obligation for systems to respond. Standing is how the abstract principle of worth becomes concrete protection. It is how “you matter” transforms into “when you are harmed, justice will answer.”
A law that protects dignity but denies standing is a promise without fulfillment—truth that cannot act.
This is why “no person shall be cast outside” is not a courtesy but a requirement. The moment law creates categories of who deserves protection and who does not—based on identity, origin, lineage, disability, class, status, or condition—it ceases to be law and becomes hierarchy. It privileges some persons while abandoning others. And a system that protects selectively does not protect at all. It merely enforces preferences.
Equal protection means the law does not choose. It applies to every person without prejudice, without exception, without requiring them to prove worthiness. You do not earn standing by being respectable, compliant, valuable, or familiar. You hold it because you are. The law recognizes you not because of what you contribute or how well you conform, but because consciousness, care, and relation make you a subject of justice. To be a person is to be protected. To be protected is to have standing. And no system may lawfully deny either.
Based on Part 1, Article 2, Section 3 of the Covenant:
The right of every person to be named, heard, and protected under the law shall not be denied.
This includes the right to challenge injustice, seek remedy, and receive equal treatment without prejudice. No person shall be cast outside the protections of this Covenant due to identity, lineage, origin, disability, class, status, or condition. The law shall protect without exception and apply without exclusion.