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Feb 19, - The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in , set the In the Declaration of the High-level Meeting on the Rule of Law.
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Objections to social rights as human rights have come from both the political right and the political left. A common objection from the left, including liberal egalitarians and socialists, is that social rights as enumerated in human rights documents and treaties provide too weak of a commitment to material equality Moyn ; Gilabert Realizing social rights requires a state that ensures to everyone an adequate minimum of resources in some key areas but that does not necessarily have strong commitments to equality of opportunity, to strong redistributive taxation, and to ceilings on wealth see the entries equality , equality of opportunity , distributive justice , and liberal feminism.

The egalitarian objection cannot be that human rights documents and treaties showed no concern for people living in poverty and misery. That would be wildly false. One of the main purposes of including social rights in human rights documents and treaties was to promote serious efforts to combat poverty, lack of education, and unhealthy living conditions in countries all around the world see also Langford on the UN Millenium Development Goals.

The objection also cannot be that human rights facilitated the hollowing out of systems of welfare rights in many developed countries that occurred after Those cuts in welfare programs were often in violation of the requirements of adequately realizing social rights. Perhaps it should be conceded that human rights documents and treaties have not said enough about positive measures to promote equal opportunity in education and work.

A positive right to equal opportunity, like the one Rawls proposed, would require countries to take serious measures to reduce disparities between the opportunities effectively available to children of high-income and low-income parents Rawls A strongly egalitarian political program is best pursued partially within but mostly beyond the human rights framework. One reason for this is that the human rights movement will have better future prospects for acceptance and realization if it has widespread political support.

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That requires that the rights it endorses appeal to people with a variety of political views ranging from center-left to center-right. Support from the broad political center will not emerge and survive if the human rights platform is perceived as mostly a leftist program. Do social rights protect sufficiently important human interests? Maurice Cranston opposed social rights by suggesting that social rights are mainly concerned with matters such as holidays with pay that are not matters of deep and universal human interests Cranston , Treatments of objections to social rights include Beetham ; Howard ; and Nickel It is far from the case, however, that most social rights pertain only to superficial interests.

Consider two examples: the right to an adequate standard of living and the right to free public education. These rights require governments to try to remedy widespread and serious evils such as severe poverty, starvation and malnutrition, and ignorance. The importance of food and other basic material conditions of life is easy to show. Without adequate access to these goods, interests in life, health, and liberty are endangered and serious illness and death are probable.

Are social rights too burdensome? Another objection to social rights is that they are too burdensome on their dutybearers. It is very expensive to guarantee to everyone basic education and minimal material conditions of life.

International Human Rights Law

Frequently the claim that social rights are too burdensome uses other, less controversial human rights as a standard of comparison, and suggests that social rights are substantially more burdensome or expensive than liberty rights. Suppose that we use as a basis of comparison liberty rights such as freedom of communication, association, and movement.


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These rights require both respect and protection from governments. And people cannot be adequately protected in their enjoyment of liberties such as these unless they also have security and due process rights. The costs of liberty, as it were, include the costs of law and criminal justice. Once we see this, liberty rights start to look a lot more costly.

Further, we should not generally think of social rights as simply giving everyone a free supply of the goods they protect. Guarantees of things like food and housing will be intolerably expensive and will undermine productivity if everyone simply receives a free supply. A viable system of social rights will require most people to provide these goods for themselves and their families through work as long as they are given the necessary opportunities, education, and infrastructure.

Note that education is often an exception to this since many countries provide free public education irrespective of ability to pay.

International human rights law

Countries that do not accept and implement social rights still have to bear somehow the costs of providing for the needy since these countries—particularly if they recognize democratic rights of political participation—are unlikely to find it tolerable to allow sizeable parts of the population to starve and be homeless.

If government does not supply food, clothing, and shelter to those unable to provide for themselves, then families, friends, and communities will have to shoulder this burden. It is only in the last hundred or so years that government-sponsored social rights have taken over a substantial part of the burden of providing for the needy. The taxes associated with social rights are partial replacements for other burdensome duties, namely the duties of families and communities to provide adequate care for the unemployed, sick, disabled, and aged. Deciding whether to implement social rights is not a matter of deciding whether to bear such burdens, but rather of deciding whether to continue with total reliance on a system of informal provision that distributes assistance in a very spotty way and whose costs fall very unevenly on families, friends, and communities.

Are social rights feasible worldwide? Another objection to social rights alleges that they are not feasible in many countries on how to understand feasibility see Gilabert Many governments will be unable to provide these guarantees while meeting other important responsibilities. Rights are not magical sources of supply Holmes and Sunstein As we saw earlier, the Social Covenant dealt with the issue of feasibility by calling for progressive implementation, that is, implementation as financial and other resources permit.

Does this view of implementation turn social rights into high-priority goals? And if so, is that a bad thing? Standards that outrun the abilities of many of their addressees are good candidates for treatment as goals. Viewing them as largely aspirational rather than as imposing immediate duties avoids problems of inability-based noncompliance.

One may worry, however, that this is too much of a demotion for social rights because goals seem much weaker than rights. But goals can be formulated in ways that make them more like rights. They can be assigned addressees the parties who are to pursue the goal , beneficiaries, scopes that define the objective to be pursued, and a high level of priority see Langford and Nickel ; see also UN Human Rights and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Strong reasons for the importance of these goals can be provided. And supervisory bodies can monitor levels of progress and pressure low-performing addressees to attend to and work on their goals. Treating very demanding rights as goals has several advantages. One is that proposed goals that greatly exceed our abilities are not so farcical as proposed duties that do so. Creating grand lists of social rights that many countries cannot presently realize seems farcical to many people.

Goals coexist easily with low levels of ability to achieve them. Another advantage is that goals are flexible: addressees with different levels of ability can choose ways of pursuing the goals that suit their circumstances and means. Because of these attractions it may be worth exploring sophisticated ways to transform very demanding human rights into goals.

The transformation may be full or partial. It is possible to create right-goal mixtures that contain some mandatory elements and that therefore seem more like real rights see Brems A right-goal mixture might include some rights-like goals, some mandatory steps to be taken immediately, and duties to realize the rights-like goals as quickly as possible.

Equality of rights for historically disadvantaged or subordinated groups is a longstanding concern of the human rights movement. Human rights documents repeatedly emphasize that all people, including women and members of minority ethnic and religious groups, have equal human rights and should be able to enjoy them without discrimination. The right to freedom from discrimination figures prominently in the Universal Declaration and subsequent treaties.


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A number of standard individual rights are especially important to ethnic and religious minorities, including rights to freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and freedom from discrimination. Human rights documents also include rights that refer to minorities explicitly and give them special protections.

Feminists have often protested that standard lists of human rights do not sufficiently take into account the different risks faced by women and men. For example, issues like domestic violence, reproductive choice, and trafficking of women and girls for sex work did not have a prominent place in early human rights documents and treaties.

This has meant that governments cannot be seen as the only addressees of human rights and that the right to privacy of home and family needs qualifications to allow police to protect women within the home. The issue of how formulations of human rights should respond to variations in the sorts of risks and dangers that different people face is difficult and arises not just in relation to gender but also in relation to age, profession, political affiliation, religion, and personal interests.

Due process rights, for example, are much more useful to young people and particularly young men than they are to older people since the latter are far less likely to run afoul of the criminal law. Since the United Nations has mainly dealt with the rights of women and minorities through specialized treaties such as the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination ; the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women ; the Convention on the Rights of the Child , and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities See also the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Specialized treaties allow international norms to address unique problems of particular groups such as assistance and care during pregnancy and childbearing in the case of women, custody issues in the case of children, and the loss of historic territories by indigenous peoples.

Minority groups are often targets of violence.

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Human rights norms call upon governments to refrain from such violence and to provide protections against it. This work is partly done by the right to life, which is a standard individual right. It is also done by the right against genocide which protects some groups from attempts to destroy or decimate them. The right against genocide is clearly a group right. It is held by both individuals and groups and provides protection to groups as groups. It is largely negative in the sense that it requires governments and other agencies to refrain from destroying groups; but it also requires that legal and other protections against genocide be created at the national level.

Can the right against genocide be a human right? More generally, can a group right fit the general idea of human rights proposed earlier? On that conception, human rights are rights of all persons. Perhaps it can, however, if we broaden our conception of who can hold human rights to include important groups that people form and cherish see the entry on group rights.

This can be made more palatable, perhaps, by recognizing that the beneficiaries of the right against genocide are individual humans who enjoy greater security against attempts to destroy the group to which they belong Kymlicka In spite of the danger of rights inflation, there are doubtless norms that should be counted as human rights but are not generally recognized as such. Consider environmental rights, which are often defined to include rights of animals or even of nature itself see the entry on environmental ethics. Alternative formulations are possible, however.

A basic environmental human right can be understood as requiring maintenance and restoration of an environment that is safe for human life and health. Many countries have environmental rights of this sort in their constitutional bills of rights Hayward A human right to a safe environment or to environmental protection does not directly address issues such as the claims of animals or biodiversity, although it might do so indirectly using the idea of ecosystem services to humans see Biodiversity and Human Rights.

A justification for a human right to a safe environment should show that environmental problems pose serious threats to fundamental human interests, values, or norms; that governments may appropriately be burdened with the responsibility of protecting people against these threats; and that most governments actually have the ability to do this. One approach, advocated by Steve Vanderheiden accepts the idea of a human right to an environment that is adequate for human life and health and derives from this broad right a more specific right to a stable climate Vanderheiden Another approach, advocated by Simon Caney, does not require introducing a new environmental right.

One could expand this approach by arguing that severe climate change should be reduced and mitigated because it will cause massive human migrations and other crises that will undermine the abilities of many governments to uphold human rights for evaluation of these arguments see Bell Two familiar philosophical worries about human rights are that they are based on moral beliefs that are culturally relative and that their creation and advocacy involves ethnocentrism.


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  8. Human rights prescribe universal standards in areas such as security, law enforcement, equality, political participation, and education. The peoples and countries of planet Earth are, however, enormously varied in their practices, traditions, religions, and levels of economic and political development. The anthropologist William G. Relativists sometimes accuse human rights advocates of ethnocentrism, arrogance, and cultural imperialism Talbott Ethnocentrism can lead to arrogance and intolerance in dealings with other countries, ethical systems, and religions.

    Finally, cultural imperialism occurs when the economically, technologically, and militarily strongest countries impose their beliefs, values, and institutions on the rest of the world. Relativists often combine these charges with a prescription, namely that tolerance of varied practices and traditions ought to be instilled and practiced through measures that include extended learning about other cultures.