Topic: Human Rights

Definition: Human rights are generally defined as those rights, which are inherent in our nature, and
without which, we cannot live as human beings. –United Nation

Human rights are rights we have simply because we exist as human beings, they are not granted
by any state. These universal rights are inherent to us all, regardless of nationality, sex, national or ethnic
origin, color, religion, language, or any other status. They range from the most fundamental - the right to life
- to those that make life worth living, such as the rights to food, education, work, health, and liberty.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the UN General Assembly in
1948, was the first legal document to set out the fundamental human rights to be universally protected. The
UDHR, which turns 75 on 10 December 2023, continues to be the foundation of all international human
rights law. Its 30 articles provide the principles and building blocks of current and future human rights
conventions, treaties and other legal instruments.

Definition of Human Rights Human rights are:

• Universal legal guarantees

• Protecting individuals and groups

• Against actions and omissions

• That interfere with fundamental freedoms, entitlements and human dignity.

• Human rights law obliges Governments and other duty-bearers to do certain things and prevents
them from doing others.

Core Principles of Human Rights

• Universal: All individuals are equal as human beings and by virtue of the inherent dignity of each
human person.

• Inalienable: All people everywhere in the world are entitled to human rights. A person cannot
voluntarily give them up. Nor can others take them away from him or her.

• Indivisible and interrelated: Rights are completely interdependent and depend on each other for
their effectiveness.

• Non-discrimination: Everyone is entitled to human rights without discrimination

• Empowerment/participation: These rights endow people the power to claim them from their
governments, as opposed to charity which is an act of generosity. Human rights are owned by everyone.
 • Accountability: Governments have certain duties and obligations to respect, protect and fulfil
human rights. (Individuals and non-state actors also have duties to others)

Rights Bearers and Duty Bearers

Philosophy and Human Rights

That individuals have rights and that these rights mark important limits on what may be done to
them by the state, or in the name of other moral conceptions – this is now a familiar position in modern
political philosophy.

Of course, the idea is familiar in non-philosophical contexts too.

Many countries embody a list of rights in their constitution, proclaiming, for example, that the
government will not interfere with the free speech of its citizens, or with their freedom of travel, their
sexual privacy, their religious liberty or their equal access to the law. These Bills of Rights also reflect
the importance in the international community of the idea of human rights – the conviction that there are
liberties and interests so basic that every society should secure them irrespective of its traditions, history or
level of economic development.

The philosophical discussion of rights is largely an exploration of this idea: what are the
implications and the presuppositions of such a ‘right-based’ approach to political morality? But as
well as their usual preoccupation with conceptual analysis – what does it mean to say ‘P has a right to X’
– philosophers are participating also in the political debates about what rights we actually have. For
example, are there rights to economic assistance as well as to civil liberty (Shue, 1980)? Should feminist
claims, or the claims of ethnic minorities, be phrased in terms of rights? Or should these claims be
expressed in a more radical political language, or in language that stresses the things that mark them as
different from others in their society.

Analysis

Although the formula ‘P has a right to do X’ is sometimes used to indicate merely that P has no
duty not to do X, its main use is to assert:

(1) That others have a duty not to prevent P from doing X

(3) That although it is a matter of self-interest, P should feel no embarrassment about insisting upon
and enforcing this duty.

Together these elements capture the sense in which a right is a legitimate claim that one person can
make against others.

Some critics (e.g. Glendon, 1991) have argued that rights, conceived in this way, are too egoistic
(self-centered) to provide a satisfactory basis for communal morality. They suggest we should place less
emphasis on rights and more on responsibilities.

The analysis I have just provided indicates that rights are correlative to duties, so that talking about
rights is a way of talking about people’s responsibilities. Moreover, most rights are conceived in universal
terms: if P has a right against Q, then Q will usually have a similar right against P so that Q’s own duties are
reciprocated by responsibilities that her right in turn imposes on P.

Social Life

In social life, it matters not only that people’s interests be respected but that they have sufficient
self-respect to stand up for their interests themselves (Hill, 1973). Rights express the idea that respect
for a given interest is to be understood from the point of view of the individual whose interest it is. By
protecting the interest, we vindicate (justify) that point of view, proclaiming that it has as much validity as
any other perspective in morality (e.g. the perspective of society or the God’s-eye point of view).

It is sometimes said that a humane social policy should focus less on rights and more on needs. I
think this too is a misunderstanding, confusing as it does the content of a claim with the normative form in
which that claim is couched. (It is like saying we should concentrate less on duties and more on truth
telling!) The language of rights as it is nowadays understood is perfectly accommodating to a concern about
human need.

To invoke a right is to predicate a duty on some concern for a certain individual interest (Raz, 1986,
p. 166), and while the interest in question is often an interest in liberty it might equally be an interest in
some material satisfaction.

There is one controversy of a broadly analytical kind which still remains unresolved.

Although rights express the importance of certain interests from the individual’s perspective, they
posit (suggest) them also as matters of moral concern. P’s right to life, for example, marks not only the
importance of P’s life to P but the moral importance (and thus, in some sense, the importance to all of us) of
P’s not being killed. But philosophers disagree about how this wider moral importance is to be understood.
Clearly each of us can say to herself, ‘I must not kill P’. Clearly also if Q kills P, then it is incumbent on the
rest of us to condemn Q and call for her apprehension and punishment. But suppose R has an
opportunity to prevent Q from killing P, but that doing so will involve some considerable cost to
herself. Does she have a duty to prevent the killing? And, if so, is that duty as important as her own duty not
to kill P?

Now, as Bernard Williams (1981, pp. 40–53) and Thomas Nagel (1986, pp. 164–85) have argued, it
sometimes is more important to orient moral justification to an agent’s own perspective than to attempt to
take an impartial point of view. But one of the features of my earlier analysis of rights was that the point of
imposing the duty is our concern for the right-bearer’s point of view, not the point of view of the agent or
duty-bearer who is constrained by the right. Barring special cases like matricide, what matters to P is
simply not being killed, as opposed to not being killed by any agent in particular. If this interest is really the
basis of R’s duty, R should be as concerned about the threat posed to P by Q’s actions as she would be about
any threat posed to P by her own.

Content

In international human rights circles, diplomats talk about ‘first-’, ‘second-’ and ‘third generation’
rights (see Alston, 1987, p. 307).

First-generation rights are the traditional liberties and privileges of citizenship: religious toleration,
freedom from arbitrary arrest, free speech, the right to vote, and so on.

Second-generation rights are socio-economic claims: the right to education, housing, healthcare,
employment and an adequate standard of living. Though these are thought to be more radical claims
requiring a more interventionist state, they remain essentially individualistic in their content, in as much
as it is the material welfare of each man, woman and child that is supposed to be secured by these
provisions.

Third-generation rights, by contrast, have to do with communities or whole peoples, rather than
individual persons. They include minority language rights, national rights to self-determination and the right
to such diffuse goods as peace, environmental integrity and economic development.

Though all these ideas express laudable aspirations, the second- and third-generation claims are
very controversial. Many theorists maintain, for substantive philosophical if not analytical reasons, that the
new claims represent a degradation of the currency of rights, a hijacking of the concept by ideologues who
are very little concerned with its liberal provenance.

I shall begin with some comments about third-generation rights. Briefly, the difficulty here is that
they are rights to ‘non-individualized’ goods – goods enjoyed collectively, rather than by individuals on
their own account. The health of the environment, for example, is a public good: if it is secured for one
person (in a region) it is necessarily secured for all. This makes it difficult to express the case for
environmental integrity in the traditional form of rights analysis, where duties are generated on the basis of
respect for an individual’s interests (Raz, 1984, pp. 186–90). The problem is even more acute for those
goods such as the survival of a language, which seem to be the essential property of a community. But
perhaps we can treat groups as right-bearers, and say that the rights of a community, particularly a minority
community, have more or less the same logic vis-à-vis some larger political entity as individual rights have
vis-à-vis the community. True, there will sometimes be problems about the identity and definition of the
groups in question. But there does not seem to be any logical or ethical difficulty with this approach,
provided of course that the rights of the group are always asserted against some larger entity rather than
against its own individual members (Waldron, 1987a, pp. 314–20).

What about second-generation rights? Do people have rights to social and economic welfare?
There are some lines of argument, which lead to the conclusion that they do.

The first argues that recognition of second-generation rights is necessary if we are to be serious in
our commitment to any rights at all. No one can fully enjoy or exercise any right that she is supposed to
have if she lacks the essentials for a healthy and active rights life. Even if most rights are oriented towards
the exercise of agency and freedom, still we know that things like malnutrition and epidemic disease can
debilitate and finally destroy all the human faculties that individual autonomy involves (Shue, 1980, pp. 24–
5).

Particular versions of this argument can also be developed for specific rights. Many feminists say,
for example, that it is not enough for abortion to be a legally secured right, if all that means is that procuring
an abortion is not a criminal offence. A poor woman who is unable to take advantage of this liberty because
she has no access to clinical services or cannot pay for the procedure is about as badly off as she would be if
there were no legal liberty at all (MacKinnon, 1991). In general, if the point of a right is to ensure that a
certain choice can be exercised, then actually facilitating the exercise may sometimes be as important as
not obstructing it.

The second argument for welfare rights is more direct. Instead of saying that economic security is
necessary if other rights are to be taken seriously, it states bluntly that socio-economic needs are as
important as any other interests, and that a moral theory of individual dignity and well-being is plainly
inadequate if it does not take them into account. The advantage of this approach is that it concedes (allows)
nothing in the way of priority to first-generation rights. Though we may be worried about the proliferation
of rights claims, it is by no means clear that demands for welfare should be the ones to give way. Death,
disease, malnutrition and exposure are as much matters of concern as any denials of political or civil
liberty.