Human rights

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Human rights refers to the concept of human beings as having universal rights, or status, regardless of legal jurisdiction or other localizing factors, such as ethnicity and nationality.

The existence, validity and the content of human rights continue to be the subject to debate in philosophy and political science. Legally, human rights are defined in international law and covenants, and further, in the domestic laws of many states. However, for many people the doctrine of human rights goes beyond law and forms a fundamental moral basis for regulating the contemporary geo-political order.

1 Legislation
2 History of human rights
3 Philosophy of Human Rights
- 3.1 Types of human rights
- 3.2 Human rights controversies
4 See also
5 References
6 External links
- 6.1 Information
- 6.2 Human rights organizations

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Legislation

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International legislation

Where it has been adopted, human rights legislation commonly contains:

security rights that protect people against crimes such as murder, massacre, torture and rape
liberty rights that protect freedoms in areas such as belief and religion, association, assembling and movement
political rights that protect the liberty to participate in politics by expressing themselves, protesting, voting and serving in public office
due process rights that protect against abuses of the legal system such as imprisonment without trial, secret trials and excessive punishments
equality rights that guarantee equal citizenship, equality before the law and nondiscrimination
welfare rights (also known as economic or social rights) that require the provision of education and protections against severe poverty and starvation
group rights that provide protection for groups against ethnic genocide and for the ownership by countries of their national territories and resources

Image:EleanorRooseveltHumanRights.gif As a result of the horrors of the Second World War and Holocaust the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. While not legally binding, it urged member nations to promote a number of human, civil, economic and social rights, asserting these rights are part of the "foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world". The declaration was the first international legal effort to limit the behaviour of states and press upon them duties to their citizens following the model of the rights-duty duality.

Many states wanted to go beyond the declaration of rights and create legal covenants which would put greater pressure on states to follow human rights norms. Because some states disagreed over whether this international covenant should contain economic and social rights (which usually require a greater effort to fulfil on the part of individual states), two treaties were prepared.

In 1976, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights came into force. With the Universal Declaration of Human Rights these documents form the International bill of rights. Since then several other pieces of legislation have been introduced at the international level:

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (entry into force: 1951) [1]
Convention against Torture (entry into force: 1984) [2]
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (entry into force: 1969) [3]
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (entry into force: 1981) [4]
Convention on the Rights of the Child (entry into force: 1989) [5]
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (entry into force: 2002)

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International bodies

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights created an agency, the Human Rights Committee to promote compliance with its norms. The eighteen members of the committee express opinions as to whether particular practice is a human rights violations, although its reports are not legally binding.

A modern interpretation of the original Declaration of Human Rights was made in the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action [6], adopted by the World Conference on Human Rights in 1993. The degree of unanimity over these conventions, in terms of how many and which countries have ratified them vary, as does the degree to which they are respected by various states. The UN has set up a number of bodies to monitor and study human rights, under the leadership of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (HCHR).

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Regional legislation

There are also many regional agreements and organisations governing human rights including the European Court of Human Rights, the only international court with jurisdiction to deal with cases brought by individuals (not states). the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

With the exception of the non-derogable human rights (the four most important are the right to life, the right to be free from slavery, the right to be free from torture and the right to be free from retroactive application of penal laws), the UN recognises that human rights can be limited or even pushed aside during times of national emergency.[7] "the emergency must be actual, affect the whole population and the threat must be to the very existence of the nation. The declaration of emergency must also be a last resort and a temporary measure." Conduct in war is governed by International Humanitarian Law.

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History of human rights

Image:Declaration of Human Rights.jpg The best-known histories of the human rights movement tend to begin with ancient religions and societies and show the evolution of concepts and institutions of human rights across civilizations. The roots of the notion of human rights are seen in ancient philosophy concerning the role of the individual in the state, but principles of civil and political rights stem from liberal freedoms advocated by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty. The concepts of economic, social and cultural rights can be traced back to Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right.

The Persian Empire established unprecedented principles of human rights in the 6th century BC under the reign of Cyrus the Great. After his conquest of Babylon in 539 BC, the king issued the Cyrus Cylinder, discovered in 1879 and recognized today as the first human rights document. The cylinder declared that citizens of the empire would be allowed to practice their religious beliefs freely. The cylinder also abolished slavery, so all the palaces of the kings of Persia were built by paid workers in an era where slaves typically did such work. These two reforms were reflected in the biblical books of Chronicles and Ezra, which state that Cyrus released the followers of Judaism from slavery and allowed them to migrate back to their land. The cylinder now lies in the British Museum, and a replica is kept at the United Nations headquarters.

Three centuries later, the Mauryan Empire of ancient India established unprecedented principles of civil rights in the 3rd century BC under the reign of Ashoka the Great. After his brutal conquest of Kalinga in circa 265 BC, he felt remorse for what he had done, and as a result, he adopted Buddhism. From that point, Ashoka, who had been described as "the cruel Ashoka" eventually came to be known as "the pious Ashoka". During his reign, he pursued an official policy of nonviolence (ahimsa). Even the unnecessary slaughter or mutilation of animals was immediately abolished, such as sport hunting and branding. Ashoka also showed mercy to those imprisoned, allowing them outside one day each year, and offered the common citizen free education at universities. He treated his subjects as equals regardless of their religion, politics or caste, and constructed free hospitals for both humans and animals. Ashoka defined the main principles of nonviolence, tolerance of all sects and opinions, obedience to parents, respect for teachers and priests, being liberal towards friends, humane treatment of servants (slavery was non-existent in India at the time), and generosity towards all. These reforms are described in the Edicts of Ashoka.

The origin of modern positive rights in international law may be traced to the creation of the International Labour Organization in 1919 as a Western response to the socialist ideology of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

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Philosophy of Human Rights

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Types of human rights

Human rights are inherent, universal, indivisible and inalienable. This means that everyone has them, they are the same for everyone, all are equally important, and they can not be taken away. Although a right can not be taken away it can be violated.

Human rights are divided into seven catagories: Civil Rights (equality before the law), Political Rights (participate in government, life, liberty), Economic Rights (living wage), Social rights (education, healthcare), Cultural rights (preserve a cultural identity, language, practices), Environmental Rights (clean drinking water, unpolluted air), and Developmental Rights (the rights of developing countries to control their own resources.)

Human rights are sometimes divided into negative and positive rights. Negative human rights, which follow mainly from the Anglo-American legal tradition, denote actions that a government should not take. These are codified in the United States Bill of Rights, the English Bill of Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and include right to life and security of person; freedom from slavery; equality before the law and due process under the rule of law; freedom of movement; and freedoms of speech, religion and assembly.

Positive human rights follow mainly from the Rousseauian Continental European legal tradition, denote rights that the state is obliged to protect and provide. Examples of such rights include: the rights to education, to a livelihood, to legal equality. Positive rights have been codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in many 20th-century constitutions.

Most governing bodies emphasisize the importance of some rights over others. Because the United States is a stong advocate of civil and political rights but does not support social, cultural and economic rights, a categorization offered by Karel Vasak is the three generations of human rights: first-generation civil and political rights, second-generation economic, social and cultural rights, and third-generation solidarity rights. Out of these generations, the third generation is the most debated and lacks both legal and political recognition.

Numerous theoretical approaches have been advanced to explain how human rights become part of social expectations. The biological theory considers the comparative reproductive advantage of human social behavior based on empathy and altruism in the context of natural selection. Other theories hold that human rights codify moral behavior, which is a human, social product developed by a process of biological and social evolution (associated with Hume) or as a sociological pattern of rule setting (as in the sociological theory of law and the work of Weber). This approach includes the notion that individuals in a society accept rules from legitimate authority in exchange for security and economic advantage (as in Rawls).

Natural law theories base human rights on the “natural” moral order based on religious precepts, the assumed common understandings of justice, or the belief that moral behavior is a set of objectively valid prescriptions. In legend, literature, religion and political thought, justice (and eventually the concept of human rights) became socially constructed over time into complex webs of social interaction striving toward a social order in which human beings are treated fairly. Religious societies tend to try to justify human rights through religious arguments. For example, liberal movements within Islam have tried to use the Qur'an to support human rights in a Muslim context.

Other theories are based on human agency, positing such constructs for agreement to rules on the utilitarian principles mediated by public reasoning. The social evolution model is based on human needs and struggle that incorporates an analysis of the norm-creating process. Values become norms through the constitutive process of authoritative decision-making. Such norms may take the form of law through a particular form of authoritative decision making of institutions associated with a legal system. It is the process of public reasoning through human rights norm-creating that progressively weeds out the culturally bound behaviors that are inconsistent with contemporary human rights. In this sense, culturally particular norms adapt to evolving human rights standards as defined in national constitutions and international human rights instruments.

Ultimately, the term "human rights" is often itself an appeal to a transcendent principle, without basing it on existing legal concepts. The term "humanism" refers to the developing doctrine of such universally applicable values.

Some authors argue that nationalism and realism weaken human rights, while individualism and cosmopolitanism strengthen them. This is argued by Demetrius Klitou in his book "The Friends and Foes of Human Rights." Klitou also outlines the need for a "human identity" in order to empower the human rights movement.

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Human rights controversies

There are a number of controversies regarding human rights including:

Are human rights political, moral or legal entities (or all three at the same time)?
Is there or should there be a hierarchy of human rights?
Do human rights impede on state sovereignty? What if the state itself has ratified international conventions?
Should human rights be used as a context for economic or military intervention? (Often leads to a worsening of the human rights situation in the target country)
Questions of cultural relativism—e.g. "Political participation is not a part of African culture. Who are you to say that we should have political participation?" These arguments can also be made on religious basis: e.g., "In our religion marriages have always been arranged; why should we not continue this practice?" Some arguments claim that human rights policies are a form of cultural imperialism in which powerful countries dictate which rights they consider most important to less powerful countries. The increasing number of third-world states that are party to international human rights treaties has made these arguments weaker, but they have not disappeared altogether. It is also worthy of note that many who criticize the actions and policies of the first-world or industrialized nations, such as the perceived interference of the United States in foreign affairs, often set up the need for human rights in opposition to imperialism, making the relationship between the two concepts highly complex.
Who should hold the moral duty to uphold rights? For civil and political rights, many would answer 'the state'. But in practice, it is frequently one's fellow citizens and civil society who need to shoulder this responsibility. It is not quite so clear who should be responsible for promoting economic, social and cultural rights (do we have a global duty?). This debate mirrors debates between communitarianism and cosmopolitanism.
Which rights should be defined as fundamental human rights? Should all human rights be considered equal?
Are countries guilty of human rights violations when their governments substantially support foreign governments that do not adhere to the established principles of human rights (within their own countries or in other countries)? (For instance, the Kirkpatrick Doctrine.)

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References

Steiner, Henry J. & Alston, Philip. (1996). International Human Rights in Context: Law, Politics, Morals. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 019825437X
Donnelly, Jack. (2003). Universal Human Rights in Theory & Practice. 2nd ed. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press.
Forsythe, David P. (2000). Human Rights in International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ignatieff, Michael. Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Shute, Stephen & Hurley, Susan (eds.). (1993). On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures. New York: BasicBooks.
Sunga, Lyal S. (1992) Individual Responsibility in International Law for Serious Human Rights Violations, Nijhoff Publishers.

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