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Human rights
The concept of human rights as the innate entitlement of all human beings found early expression during the American and French revolutionary movements of the late 18th century, but received little further development until the conclusion of World War II. It then acquired the current connotation of a body of entitlements whose realisation is considered to be a universal obligation. This article is about the implementation of that concept of human rights. Doubts have been expressed about its ethical foundations, and about its philosophical consistency, but its emotional impact upon worldwide consciousness is beyond doubt. As a result, it has acquired considerable political importance, and has been embodied in a wide range of generally-accepted international treaty obligations. There have been numerous breaches of those undertakings, and there is widespread disagreement concerning the appropriate international response to such breaches.
The nature of the concept
As an ethical concept, the term human rights is not susceptible to precise definition concerning either its content or its scope. The generally-held judgement that torture is wrong does not depend upon agreement concerning the degree of pain or discomfort that it involves; and the ethical purpose of banning it is served if the ban puts an end to what most people consider to be torture. There is widespread agreement concerning many of the practices that are considered to be breaches of human rights, but the disagreements that exist - concerning, for example, abortion, the death penalty and blasphemy - are not held to justify a wholesale rejection of the concept. And, although human rights are generally considered to be innate to their possessors, the fact they can be given effect only by the assent of others, makes them difficult to distinguish from community-granted rights.
The historical background
The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights is generally held to have been inspired by revulsion at the treatment or the victims of the holocaust and by wartime aspirations for a better post-war world. Although much of its content was new, 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. Its unprecedented feature was its claim to be doubly universal - to invoke the universal acceptance of agreed obligations, as well as the recognition of what were agreed to be universal entitlements. It was an overstated claim, however, in view of the absence among it signatories of many of the countries that are now members of the United Nations, and the fact that many of its signatories were themselves in breach of its proposed obligations[1]. The actual content of the declaration was, as Justice Michael Kirby recalls [2] a political compromise, and rights were included that apparently stood little chance of unqualified implementation.
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