What Are Human Rights?

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Human rights are moral and legal rights that people are entitled to in the course of their lives. They are indivisible, interdependent and inalienable. People cannot lose their human rights, but in certain circumstances they may be suspended or restricted. Human rights are universal, and people have them regardless of their political, cultural or religious affiliations. The universality and inalienability of human rights make them a unique concept in the world of international law.

Many different theories of human rights exist. One approach, which is very widespread in the western world, holds that human rights are derived from natural laws, stemming from different philosophical or religious sources. Another theory maintains that human rights codify the moral behavior of humans developed by social and biological evolution. Still other theories claim that human rights are a sociological pattern of rule setting, similar to a form of property law or a system of contract rules.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, major advances were made in social progress, including the abolition of slavery, the introduction of universal education and the extension of political rights. However, international action to support human rights remained weak and the general attitude was that nations were free to do what they wanted within their borders, and that other countries should not interfere in their domestic affairs.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed by more than a hundred countries in 1948, changed this. The treaty states that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights and that they are inalienable. It declares that no person shall be subjected to torture or cruel treatment; that everyone has the right to freedom of religion; that everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care. It further states that all of these rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent and inalienable.

It is clear that the Universal Declaration aims to be an international standard on human rights. It has been ratified by almost all countries, and it forms the basis for international conventions and treaties on human rights that have followed. However, the process by which these rights were identified was a political process with plenty of imperfections. Some people have argued that, because of this, it is not reasonable to take the official lists of human rights as authoritative guides for what rights are legitimately demanded.

A second, and more controversial, way of supporting human rights is to argue that they are innate in some sense. This argument is usually based on the idea that there are moral reasons that exist independently of human construction, and that these can, when combined with true premises about current institutions, problems and resources, generate different kinds of moral norms than those currently accepted or enacted (see Morsink 2009).