Human rights are basic freedoms that everyone is entitled to, and that governments have an obligation to respect and protect. They embody a universal understanding of freedom, dignity and equality and are rooted in many traditions and philosophies, although they were first articulated as an international concept following World War II. They are fundamental to the peace and prosperity of mankind and form part of international law, reinforced by a range of treaties and mechanisms for their monitoring and enforcement.
Human rights can be seen as a response to the horrors of the Holocaust and other instances of mass atrocity and genocide in which millions of people were murdered and many more left displaced from their homes and deprived of their property, livelihoods and social standing. They have been developed as a response to the fact that, in the aftermath of those disasters, the major states of the world recognised the need to establish a global framework to protect individuals and communities from future atrocities.
They have also been developed as a way of ensuring that the international community is held to account when governments fail to meet their obligations under existing human rights treaties and conventions, which are monitored by a network of independent experts and enforced through national courts. They are thus a powerful tool for promoting and protecting democracy, preventing human rights violations and fostering a sense of shared responsibility and respect among all members of the human family.
In recent decades there has been a broad consensus on what should be protected as human rights. The rights to life, liberty, security, and the free development of an individual have gained wide acceptance as fundamental and inalienable. In addition, many other issues that once seemed controversial have now been framed as human rights, such as the right to privacy or to a clean environment.
These developments have raised questions about whether human rights are becoming too extensive, with an ever-expanding list of protections that may not all be necessary or justifiable. One argument against this is minimalism, which holds that human rights should be limited to those protections that are genuinely essential to the well-being of all people, address one or more genuine threats to those essential goods, be feasible in most countries’ political institutions (such as law, courts, legislatures, executive agencies, bureaucracies, militaries, prisons and public schools), and not generate undue costs for others.
This approach has been criticised for its inability to explain the universality of human rights, and for ignoring the role that practicalities play in shaping them. A second approach is based on the theory that the generic function of human rights is to protect normative agency and take advantage of facts about human nature and society.
The success of the human rights movement will depend on its ability to appeal to a wide range of political interests, including those with a more centre-right rather than a more leftist view. To do this it will need to provide justifications for a broad range of contemporary rights and, if possible, be seen as a set of principles that are broadly endorsed across the political spectrum.