Human rights

This article adopts the colloquial interpretation of the term human rights as a universal body of entitlements, as distinct from its broader interpretation as the equivalent of domestic "civil rights". It is mainly concerned with the developments of the concept of human rights that have taken place since the issue in 1948 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Among those developments have been its near-universal popular endorsement as a statement of the principles that should govern the way governments treat their citizens, and a far from universal realisation of those principles. Agencies of the United Nations have conferred operational significance on the declaration by the creation of an agreed body of international treaties and have implemented mechanisms for monitoring compliance with them. Regional and national authorities have taken further action, extending in some cases to legislation. A number of civil and criminal law actions concerning human rights have been taken in courts created for the purpose. Misgivings remain however, concerning the philosophical foundations of the concept, and there has been popular opposition to some of its court rulings, and to the adoption of the promotion of human rights as an objective of foreign policy.

Introduction

Historical background

The 1948 declaration of human rights is generally held to have been inspired by revulsion at the treatment or the victims of the holocaust and by aspirations for a better post-war world. Although much of its content was consequently without precedent, there were precedents for its concept of universally innate human entitlements in the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. An unprecedented feature was its claim to be doubly universal - to involve the universal acceptance of agreed obligations, as well as a recognition of universal entitlements. It was an overstated claim, however, in view of the abstention of the Soviet bloc countries, the necessary absence of the British and American colonies, and the exclusion of Germany, Italy and Japan. Moreover its impact upon the countries that agreed to it must have been limited by their awareness that its American and British sponsors were asking other countries to accept obligations that they themselves could not meet. As Michael Ignatieff has observed

many of the states that contributed to the drafting of the Universal Declaration saw no apparent contradiction between endorsing international norms abroad and continuing oppression at home. They thought that the Universal Declaration would remain a pious set of clichés more practiced in the breach than in the observance.

Yet once articulated as international norms, rights language ignited both the colonial revolutions abroad and the civil rights revolution at home

Philosophical objections

cultural relativism