Nature of human rights. Categories of rights

There are various approaches to understanding the nature of human rights. Thus, the rules of the U.S. Constitution, France, Italy and Spain embody natural law concept of human rights, and the Constitution of Germany and Austria - positivist.

Karel Vasak, a Czech Jurist classified Human Rights into three categories in 1979 as:

1. Human Rights of First Generation: International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

First-generation human rights, often called "blue" rights, deal essentially with liberty and participation in political life. They are fundamentally civil and political in nature: They serve negatively to protect the individual from excesses of the state. First-generation rights include, among other things, freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial, freedom of religion and voting rights. They were pioneered by the United States Bill of Rights and in France by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in the 18th century, although the right to due process goes back to the Magna Carta of 1215 and the Rights of Englishmen. They were enshrined at the global level and given status in international law first by Articles 3 to 21 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and later in the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

2. Human Rights of Second Generation: International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

Second-generation human rights are related to equality and began to be recognized by governments after World War II. They are fundamentally economic, social and cultural in nature. They guarantee different members of the citizenry equal conditions and treatment. Secondary rights would include a right to be employed, rights to housing and health care, as well as social security and unemployment benefits. Like first-generation rights, they were also covered by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and further embodied in Articles 22 to 27 of the Universal Declaration, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.

In the United States of America, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a Second Bill of Rights, covering much the same grounds, during his State of the Union Address on January 11, 1944. Today, many nations, states, or groups of nations have developed legally binding declarations guaranteeing comprehensive sets of human rights, e.g. the European Social Charter.

These rights are sometimes referred to as "red" rights. They impose upon the government the duty to respect and promote and fulfil them, but this depends on the availability of resources. The duty is imposed on the state because it controls its own resources. No one has the direct right to housing and right to education. (In South Africa, for instance, the right is not, per se, to housing, but rather "to have access to adequate housing," realised on a progressive basis.)

The duty of government is in the realisation of these rights as a positives.

3. Human Rights of Third Generation: Collective Rights

Third-generation human rights are those rights that go beyond the mere civil and social, as expressed in many progressive documents of international law, including the 1972 Stockholm Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, and other pieces of generally aspirational "soft law." Because of the present-day tilting toward national sovereignty and the preponderance of would-be offender nations, these rights have been hard to enact in legally binding documents.

The term "third-generation human rights" remains largely unofficial, just as the also-used moniker of "green" rights, and thus houses an extremely broad spectrum of rights, including:

- Group and collective rights

- Right to self-determination

- Right to economic and social development

- Right to a healthy environment

- Right to natural resources

- Right to communicate and communication rights

- Right to participation in cultural heritage

- Rights to intergenerational equity and sustainability

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 836