HUMAN RIGHTS
Human rights
Human
rights are moral principles
or norms that
describe certain standards of human behaviour, and are regularly protected
as legal 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 are regarded as requiring empathy
and the rule of law and
imposing an obligation on persons to respect the human rights of others, and
it is generally considered that they should not be taken away except as a
result of due process based
on specific circumstances; for example, human rights may include freedom
from unlawful imprisonment, torture and execution.
The doctrine of human rights has
been highly influential within international law, global and regional
institutions. Actions by states and non-governmental
organisations form a basis of public policy worldwide. The idea of
human rights suggests
that "if the public discourse of peacetime global society can be said to
have a common moral language, it is that of human rights." The strong
claims made by the doctrine of human rights continue to provoke
considerable scepticism and
debates about the content, nature and justifications of human rights to this
day. The precise meaning of the term right is controversial and is the
subject of continued philosophical debate; while there is consensus that
human rights encompasses a wide variety of rights such as
the right to a fair trial,
protection against enslavement, prohibition
of genocide, free speech, or
a right to education,
there is disagreement about which of these particular rights should be included
within the general framework of human rights; some thinkers suggest that
human rights should be a minimum requirement to avoid the worst-case abuses,
while others see it as a higher standard.
Many
of the basic ideas that animated the human rights movement developed
in the aftermath of the Second World War and the events of The Holocaust, culminating in the
adoption of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights in Paris by the United
Nations General Assembly in 1948. Ancient peoples did not have
the same modern-day conception of universal human rights. The true forerunner
of human rights discourse was the concept of natural rights which
appeared as part of the medieval natural law tradition that became
prominent during the European Enlightenment with
such philosophers as John Locke, Francis
Hutcheson and Jean-Jacques
Burlamaqui, and which featured prominently in the political
discourse of the American Revolution and
the French Revolution. From
this foundation, the modern human rights arguments emerged over the latter half
of the 20th century, possibly as a reaction to slavery, torture, genocide
and war crimes, as a realisation of inherent human vulnerability and as
being a precondition for the possibility of a just society.
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