Shue, Henry. "Mediating Duties". Ethics, Vol.98, No.4 (1988): 687-704.

Shue, Henry. "Mediating Duties". Ethics, Vol.98, No.4 (1988): 687-704.

• Guaranteeing universal human rights can be difficult and costly because many of these rights, like those to food and shelter, require resources and labour. This situation is conditioned by the fact that although there are lots of people and plenty of resources, these resources are distributed extremely unevenly with the majority of humanity having very limited access to necessary resources (687).
• All human rights take some effort and resources to guarantee. Even negative rights require the protection of individuals from other individuals by their communities, usually states. Provision of any human rights then, has an associated cost (688).
• Duties to provide rights to others are split along a number of dichotomies. A negative duty requires not doing something, whereas a positive duty requires doing something. A special duty is only owed to specific individuals for a contractual or historical reason, whereas a general duty is owed to everyone because they are human beings. A perfect duty is a required task that must be performed, whereas an imperfect duty is voluntary and cannot be demanded (688-689).
• The existence of universal human rights does not translate into universal human duties. Although all children have a right to food, this does not imply a duty by all adults to feed them since this is well beyond the financial capability of most of the world; practically there cannot be a universal moral duty towards everyone else (689).
• The simple practical limitations on providing food or other positive rights to everyone mean that there must exist some division of duties among people so that some people are responsible for the rights of some groups, and others are responsible for the duties of different groups (690).
• Negative rights, where they do not imply costs to protect individuals, do translate into universal duties since it is perfectly feasible for every individual on Earth to not actively infringe on the human rights of every other person (690). 
• The practical limits of human agency mean that each person can only be directly involved in the provision of rights for a finite community of people, the question is deciding who constitutes this community. Commonsense intuition would indicate that the first group is family, as non-inclusion of this group goes against basic human sentiment (691-692).
• The other groups to whom we owe duties, however, are currently decided mostly by geography; the author believes that this is nonsensical. In the past the geographical orientation of duties made sense, just because assisting people far away was totally impractical. With new technology, however, these geographical barriers no longer exist (692-693).
• This view of new non-geographical connections is complicated, however, but the existence of bureaucratic systems which regulate international commerce and interactions. The fact that these are primary international actors limits individual and personal responsibility (695).
• The other definite objection to extending duties to foreigners is that, whereas geography and nationality are finite categories of responsibility with supporting institutions, 'foreigner' as a category is massive and unbounded. Therefore, an increase in the number of foreigners due to population growth cannot result in an increase of responsibility or duties for individual people (695).
• "We have good reasons to include institutional implementers of positive duty. The prior philosophical challenge, however, is the assignment of the underlying positive duties to individuals in a manner that is not arbitrary but does not bog down in a hopeless quest for prior connections of the kind that ususually must underlie special duties" (698).
• The scope of the resources necessary to fulfill all human rights is so large that individual contributions can make very little different unless organized and coordinated. The massive increases in efficiency that could result from organizing duties into institutions points towards this as the clear solution (695-696).
• The best solution for this would be to force pre-existing international institutions, including transnational firms and international organizations, to adopt their conduct according to standards of human rights and redirect at least a portion of their resources towards implement positive moral duties (697-698).
• Most general theories of rights require that there exist a reason or historical justification for the transfer of resources from one person to another, and a system be in place to guarantee that transfer. Since not everyone can owe duties to everyone else, some division of labour must exist, but human beings demand some logicial explanation for the nature of this division (699).
• This can be partially avoiding through moral principles like the acknowledgement that the poor deserve some form of support from the more well off, guranteed through shared institutions. The issue is that the international community has not yet developed these institutions (701-702).

The author is basically saying that international institutions are a necessity for the proper enforcement of positive human rights, because one guy cannot be responsible for all the world's problems and coordination is needed. Without institutions, aid is inefficient and distribution is arbitrary, meaning again that international institutions are necessary to enforcing universal human rights.