Comprehending Human Rights

Are they legal, political, moral, or natural?

         “All human beings have the rights that are enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (The Open University, 2020a), but are all individuals enjoying what each one of these rights entail? The fact is that even though the UN is upholding the fact that all humans have these rights, some people enjoy them plentifully, but others look like they have despised some of their rights because they only enjoy a handful of them.

Why is it that some people have all or just a portion of them? The explanation can be simple if we focus on a nation’s legal or political structures that support them. As pointed out by The Open University (2020b), this “depends on certain legal or political frameworks respecting and upholding them.” The absence of this type of enforcement means that citizens do not have those rights legally or constitutionally extoled in their magna cartas. “Governments enshrine certain rights by passing laws and police forces and courts enforce them” (The Open University, 2020b). North Korea’s political framework, e.g., does not support the freedom of speech enshrined in Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the legal upshot of this is that the North Koreans have the very same right as a calabash to publicly disagree with governmental decisions. Yet all individuals living in repressive regimes are entitled with this speech right but in their own countries. This sounds rather contradictory, but it is the reality they have to live. This is like a working horse being held from its hind legs when plowing the land.

Human rights are moral rather than legal. The question then lingers: Are human rights for all individuals? Sure; this is a resounding yes! However, it needs to be understood that “human rights are fundamental moral rights that any and every human being has and which we should seek to uphold, establish and defend everywhere, at all times” (The Open University, 2020b). In the eyes of politicians, -for instance-, moral rights do not and should not interfere with a nation’s legal system. Take the case of the United States in 2017 when “Amnesty accused the U.S. government of setting the tone for a year of ‘hate-filled rhetoric’ that fueled bigotry and persecution across the world” (Meredith, 2018) when six Muslim-majority countries’ citizens were banned to travel to the United States. Based on this example, no human being should be discriminated because of its creed or religious beliefs. Morally speaking this can be labelled as an unethical decision yet legal.

To end up, human rights should also be considered “natural rights.” A natural right “supposedly transcends any political or historical situation and does not depend on being established by any legal or political institutions” (The Open University, 2020c). Human rights predate the foundation of civilizations; “natural rights are thus rights that morally ought to be respected, even if in practice, they sometimes are not legally or politically respected” (The Open University, 2020c). Human rights are natural, moral fundamental rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but that are unfortunately not backed up by legal or political structures in all countries around the globe.

Comprehending Human Rights by Jonathan Acuña on Scribd

Monday, November 09, 2020