The right to be human

1988

A glance at history shows that the progressive development of human rights has been considerably conditioned by the evolution of social relations, and the forms in which these relations were institutionalized. It was not in abstract that newly recognised human rights came to be defined, but in the context of the modern state and that of an industrial and technological civilization; in the context of the bitter experience of two World Wars and the social and political evolution after 1945. This evolution has been characterized by a process of decolonialisation, by a growing sense of solidarity among mankind, and by a widespread awareness of the delicate ecological balance of our one and only Earth which is limited in its natural resources. The remarkable thing about the evolution of human rights is that it appears to have followed in a given direction. In fact, we notice the widening of the concept of human rights which had originated in the eighteenth century. Throughout the whole d...

2012

Introduction 159 9.2 The right to work 160 9.2.1 Is there a guarantee of the right to work? 161 9.2.2 Elements of the right to work 162 Access to employment 163 Free choice in employment 164 Freedom from arbitrary dismissal 165 9.3 The right to education 165 9.3.1 The right to education in international human rights instruments 166 9.3.2 Access to education 166 9.3.3 Aims and objectives of education 168 9.3.3 Academic freedom 170 9.3.4 The right to human rights education 170 904 Conclusion 172

Human rights are moral principles or norms, that describe certain standards of human behavior, and are regularly protected aslegal rights in municipal and international law. They are commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights "to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being," and which are "inherent in all human beings" regardless of their nation, location, language, religion, ethnic origin or any other status. They are applicable everywhere and at every time in the sense of being universal, and they are egalitarian in the sense of being the same for everyone. They require empathy and the rule of law and impose an obligation on persons to respect the human rights of others. Yet, we often are debating on the issues of the existence of these rights. The society has reduced its standard and has lowered down in underestimating the existence of fellow humans. the article analyses the emergence and the existence of human rights being bestowed on humans by the virtue of their existence.

Journal of Human Rights, 2004

The spirit of human rights has been transmitted consciously and unconsciously from one generation to another, carrying the scars of its tumultuous past. Today, invoking the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly in 1948, one may think of human rights as universal, inalienable and indivisible, as rights shared equally by everyone regardless of sex, race, nationality and economic background. Yet conflicting political traditions across the centuries have elaborated different visions of human rights rooted in past social struggles. That historical legacy and current conflicting meanings of human rights are, despite the admirable efforts of the architects of the declaration, all reflected in the structure and the substance of this important UN document. Using the main keys developed in the declaration, this article engages six core controversies over human rights that have shaped human rights debate and scholarship. It also draws on the historical record in order to identify and to clarify several misconceptions that persist both within and outside the human rights community today. René Cassin, one of the main drafters of the universal declaration, classified the central tenets of human rights by comparing them to the portico of a temple. Drawing on the battle cry of the French revolution, Cassin identified the four pillars of the declaration as: 'dignity, liberty, equality, and brotherhood'. The 27 articles of the declaration were divided among these four pillars. The pillar supported the roof of the portico (articles 28-30), which stipulated the conditions in which the rights of individuals could be realized within society and the state. Each of the pillars represents a major historical milestone. The first pillar covered in the first two articles of the declaration stands for human dignity shared by all individuals regardless of their religion, creed, ethnicity, religion, or sex; the second, specified in articles 3-19 of the declaration, invokes the first generation of civil liberties and other liberal rights fought for during the Enlightenment; the third, delineated in articles 20-26, addresses the second generation of rights, i.e. those related to political, social and economic equity and championed during the industrial revolution; the fourth (articles 27-28) focuses on the third generation of rights associated with communal and national solidarity, as advocated during the late 19th century and early 20th century and throughout the postcolonial era. In a sense, the sequence of the articles corresponds to the historical appearance of successive generations and visions of universal rights. 1 Yet throughout history, the human rights projects reflected in the declaration-whether liberal, socialist, or 'third world' in origin-generated internal contradictions concerning both how to promote human rights and who should be endowed with equal human rights. For instance, while the modern nation-state was originally justified by claims that it would promote human rights, the subsequent prevalence of realpolitik and particularism inspired 19th and 20th century efforts to embody universalism in the form of a succession of

This article explores the emerging historiography of human rights. After reviewing the current emphasis in the literature on the origins of human rights, the essay inquires into possible futures of this nascent historical field. What might scholarly interest in more unified frames of knowledge that bridge the natural and the cultural realms mean for future historiographies of human rights?

Manchester University Press eBooks, 2010

The construction of human rights: dominant approaches 19 T he idea of human rights covers a complex and fragmentary terrain. As R. J. Vincent comments near the beginning of his work on human rights in international relations, 'human rights' is a readily used term that has become a 'staple of world politics', the meaning of which is by no means self-evident (1986: 7). After glossing the term as the 'idea that humans have rights' (1986: 7)-a deceptively simple approach-Vincent notes that this is a profoundly contested territory, philosophically as well as politically. This is not surprising, as notions of human rights draw indirectly or directly on some of our most deeply embedded presumptions and reference-points-for those of us in liberal democracies, particularly those cosmologies concerning the nature of the person and of political community. Questions about and concepts of the human as individual, of what is right, the state, justice, freedom, equality, and so on, flicker like a constellation of stars just off the edge of our fields of analysis-fading in and out, holding much, promising or claimed as anchorage, yet elusive and obscure. For many, the assertion of human rights has become a kind of repository of secular virtue-a declaration of the sacred in the absence of the divine. In the Western liberal democracies, human rights are claimed as political home or as a principal 'instrument of struggle' by the libertarian right, by liberals of various persuasions, by socialists who feel the traditional socialist agenda has been overtaken by events and by 'post-liberal democrats'. To declare in a debate that the matter at hand involves rights can be to 'trump' discussion, drawing the limits beyond which exchange may not go, in a way that Ronald Dworkin (1977, 1984) probably did not intend. The language of rights thus carries great power while being potentially deeply divided against itself. The purpose of this chapter is to draw attention to some of the orders of thought that dominate human rights promotion and shape the meaning of this powerful, complex and in some ways contradictory tool of rights and 'rights talk'. In particular, I want to underline the limitations of these orders of thought, the narrowness of some of their central categories and the disfiguring M. Anne Brown-9781526121110

International Journal, 2005

2018

Since 1948, seven decades have passed. Even though this is said to be the “fastest time” in the history of time, these seven decades are probably too short a period to enable us to draw a line under and truly and thoroughly re-examine the heritage of the most ambitious charter in the history of human rights. Too little time has passed to understand how to realize the promise of the Universal Declaration: that world peace is necessary for each member of the human community to have the right to life. Finally, it is possible that such a request can never move further than a promise, and the decades which are behind us can perhaps do nothing other than confirm that this promise stands firstly as a warning, rather than as any kind of model for use.