1. States exist. Some 200 of them.
2. States are the political arrangements in which a people express their self-determination. That arrangement can and does change.
3. States enjoy rights, but only against each other. For example, they have the right not to face unprovoked aggression from another state.
4. No state has some enduring, abstract “right” to exist. Otherwise, bad ones like apartheid South Africa would be unreformable.
5. Peoples, by contrast, do have a right to exist. That’s why states that commit apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide are so gravely violating international law. Because they are violating a people’s right to exist.