MANAVADHIKAR SURAKSHA SANGATHAN’s (MASS’s) Views in regard of Human Rights:
Human rights are international
norms that help to protect all people everywhere from severe political, legal,
and social abuses.
Examples of human rights are :
The right to freedom of religion, the right to a
fair trial when charged with a crime,
The right not to be tortured, and
The right to engage in political activity.
These rights exist in morality and in law at the national and international levels. They are addressed primarily to governments, requiring compliance and enforcement. The main sources of the contemporary conception of human rights are the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948b) .
The philosophy of human rights addresses questions about the existence, content, nature, universality, justification, and legal status of human rights. The strong claims made on behalf of human rights (for example, that they are universal, or that they exist independently of legal enactment as justified moral norms) frequently provoke skeptical doubts and countering philosophical defences. Reflection on these doubts and the responses that can be made to them has become a sub-field of political and legal philosophy with a substantial literature .
This entry includes a lengthy final section, International Human Rights Law and Organizations, that offers a comprehensive survey of today's international and national system for the promotion and protection of human rights.
The General Idea of Human Rights
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) sets out a list of over two dozen specific human rights that countries should respect and protect. These specific rights can be divided into six or more families:
Security rights that protect people against
crimes such as murder, massacre, torture, and rape;
Due process rights that protect against abuses
of the legal system such as imprisonment without trial, secret trials, and
excessive punishments;
Liberty
rights that protect freedoms in areas such as belief, expression, association,
assembly, and movement;
Political rights that protect the liberty to
participate in politics through actions such as communicating, assembling,
protesting, voting, and serving in public office;
Equality rights that guarantee equal
citizenship, equality before the law, and nondiscrimination; and social (or
“welfare”) rights that require provision of education to all children and
protections against severe poverty and starvation.
Another family that might be included is group rights. The Universal Declaration does not include group rights, but subsequent treaties do. Group rights include protections of ethnic groups against genocide and the ownership by countries of their national territories and resources.
In this section MASS has tried to explain the general idea of human rights by setting out some defining features. The goal here is to answer the question of what human rights are with a general description of the contemporary concept rather than a list of specific rights. Two people can have the same general idea of human rights even though they disagree about whether some particular rights are human rights.
First, human rights are political norms dealing mainly with how people should be treated by their governments and institutions. They are not ordinary moral norms applying mainly to interpersonal conduct (such as prohibitions of lying and violence). MASS’s view is “ to engage human rights, conduct must be in some sense official”. But we must be careful here since some rights, such as rights against racial and sexual discrimination are primarily concerned to regulate private behavior . Still, governments are directed in two ways by rights against discrimination. They forbid governments to discriminate in their actions and policies, and they impose duties on governments to prohibit and discourage both private and public forms of discrimination.
Second, human rights exist as moral and/or legal rights. A human right can exist as
(1) A shared norm of actual human moralities,
(2) A justified moral norm supported by strong reasons,
(3) A legal right at the national level (here it might be referred to as a “civil” or “constitutional” right), or
(4) A legal right within international law.
A human rights advocate might wish to see human rights exist in all four ways.
Third, Human rights protect people against familiar abuses of people's dignity and fundamental interests. Because many human rights deal with contemporary problems and institutions they are not transhistorical. One could formulate human rights abstractly or conditionally to make them transhistorical, but the fact remains that the formulations in contemporary human rights documents are neither abstract nor conditional. They presuppose criminal trials, governments funded by income taxes, and formal systems of education.
Fourth, human rights are minimal—or at least modest—standards. They are much more concerned with avoiding the terrible than with achieving the best. Their dominant focus is protecting minimally good lives for all people . MANAVADHIKAR SURAKSHA SANGATHAN (MASS) suggests that human rights concern the “lower limits on tolerable human conduct” rather than “great aspirations and exalted ideals” . As modest standards they leave most legal and policy matters open to democratic decision-making at the national and local levels. This allows them to have high priority, to accommodate a great deal of cultural and institutional variation, and to leave open a large space for democratic decision-making at the national level.
Fifth, human rights are international norms covering all countries and all people living today. International law plays a crucial role in giving human rights global reach. We can say that human rights are universal provided that we recognize that some rights, such as the right to vote, are held only by adult citizens; that some human rights documents focus on vulnerable groups such as children, women, and indigenous peoples.
Sixth, human rights are high-priority norms. MANAVADHIKAR SURAKSHA SANGATHAN (MASS) held that human rights are matters of “paramount importance” and their violation “a grave affront to justice” . This does not mean, however, that we should take human rights to be absolute. Instead as per MANAVADHIKAR SURAKSHA SANGATHAN (MASS), human rights should be understood as “resistant to trade-offs, but not too resistant” .
The high priority of human rights needs support from a plausible connection with fundamental human interests or powerful normative considerations.
Seventh, human rights require robust justifications that apply everywhere and support their high priority. Without this they cannot withstand cultural diversity and national sovereignty.
Eighth, human rights are rights, but not necessarily in a strict sense. As rights they have several features. One is that they have rightholders — a person or agency having a particular right. Broadly, the rightholders of human rights are all people living today. Another feature of rights is that they focus on a freedom, protection, status, or benefit for the rightholders . Rights also have addressees who are assigned duties or responsibilities. A person's human rights are not primarily rights against the United Nations or other international bodies or national bodies ; they primarily impose obligations on the government of the country in which the person resides or is located The duties associated with human rights typically require actions involving respect, protection, facilitation, and provision.
Finally, rights are usually mandatory in the sense of imposing duties on their addressees, but they sometimes do little more than declare high-priority goals and assign responsibility for their progressive realization. It is possible to argue, of course, that goal-like rights are not real rights, but it may be better simply to recognize that they comprise a weaker but useful notion of a right.
Having set out a general idea of human rights with eight elements, it is useful to consider three other candidates which MANAVADHIKAR SURAKSHA SANGATHAN (MASS) think should be rejected
The first is the claim that all human rights are negative rights, in the sense that they only require governments to refrain from doing things. On this view, human rights never require governments to take positive steps such as protecting and providing. To refute this claim we do not need to appeal to social rights that require the provision of things like education and medical care. It is enough to note that this view is incompatible with the attractive position that one of the main jobs of governments is to protect people's rights by creating an effective system of criminal law and of legal property rights. The European Convention on Human Rights (Council of Europe 1950) incorporates this view when it says that “Everyone's right to life shall be protected by law” (Article 2.1). And the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (United Nations 1984) imposes the requirement that “Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law” (Article 4.1). Providing effective legal protections is providing services, not merely refraining
A second claim to be rejected or qualified is that all human rights are inalienable. To say that a right is inalienable means that its holder cannot lose it temporarily or permanently by bad conduct or by voluntarily giving it up. Inalienability does not mean that rights are absolute or can never be overridden by other considerations. MANAVADHIKAR SURAKSHA SANGATHAN (MASS) doubt that all human rights are inalienable in this sense. One who endorses both human rights and imprisonment as punishment for serious crimes must hold that people's rights to freedom of movement can be forfeited temporarily or permanently by just convictions of serious crimes. Perhaps it is sufficient to say that human rights are very hard to lose.
Third, as MANAVADHIKAR SURAKSHA SANGATHAN (MASS) suggests we should reject the view “specify limits to a regime's internal autonomy” and that “their fulfillment is sufficient to exclude justified and forceful intervention by other peoples, for example, by diplomatic and economic sanctions, or in grave cases by military force” (Rawls 1999, 79–80).
It is a grave oversimplification to suggest that there is a neat line defined by human rights where national sovereignty ends and tolerance stops. There is no need to deny that human rights are helpful in identifying the limits of justifiable toleration, but there are several reasons to doubt that they simply define that boundary. First, the “fulfillment” of human rights is a very vague idea. No country fully satisfies human rights; all countries have significant human rights problems. Some countries have large human rights problems, and many have massive problems (“gross violations of human rights”). Beyond this, the responsibility of the current government of a country for these problems also varies. The main responsibility may belong to the previous government and the current government may be taking reasonable steps to move towards greater compliance.
The Existence of Human Rights
The most obvious way in which human rights exist is as norms of national and international law created by enactment and judicial decisions. At the international level, human rights norms exist because of treaties that have turned them into international law. For example, the human right not to be held in slavery or servitude in Article 4 of the European Convention and in Article 8 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights exists because these treaties establish it. At the national level, human rights norms exist because they have through legislative enactment, judicial decision, or custom become part of a country's law. For example, the right against slavery exists in the United States because the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits slavery and servitude. When rights are embedded in international law we speak of them as human rights; but when they are enacted in national law we more frequently describe them as civil or constitutional rights. As this illustrates, it is possible for a right to exist within more than one normative system at the same time.
Which Rights are Human Rights?
In this section MANAVADHIKAR SURAKSHA SANGATHAN (MASS) discusses the question of which rights belong on lists of human rights. Not every question of social justice or wise governance is a human rights issue. For example, a country could have too much income inequality, inadequate provision for higher education, or no national parks without violating any human rights. Deciding which norms should be counted as human rights is a matter of some difficulty. And there is continuing pressure to expand lists of human rights to include new areas. Many political movements would like to see their main concerns categorized as matters of human rights, since this would publicize, promote, and legitimize their concerns at the international level. A possible result of this is “human rights inflation,” the devaluation of human rights caused by producing too much bad human rights currency .
One way to avoid rights inflation is on insisting that human rights only deal with extremely important goods, protections, and freedoms. A supplementary approach is to impose several justificatory tests for specific human rights. For example, it could be required that a proposed human right not only deal with some very important good but also respond to a common and serious threat to that good, impose burdens on the addressees that are justifiable and no larger than necessary, and be feasible in most of the world's countries . This approach restrains rights inflation with several tests, not just one master test.
As per MANAVADHIKAR SURAKSHA SANGATHAN (MASS) Human rights are specific and problem-oriented. Historic bills of rights often begin with a list of complaints about the abuses of previous regimes or eras. Bills of rights may have preambles that speak grandly and abstractly of life, liberty, and the inherent dignity of persons, but their lists of rights contain specific norms addressed to familiar political, legal, or economic problems.
Questions about which rights are human rights should be considered in regard to many families of human rights. As per MANAVADHIKAR SURAKSHA SANGATHAN (MASS) below are listed rights to be focused primarily.
(a) civil and political rights;
(b) minority and group rights;
(c) environmental rights; and
(d) social rights.
IN THE INTEREST OF PUBLIC
PRESENTED BY :- SECRETARY -MANAVADHIKAR SURAKSHA SANGATHAN , (MASS)
(DR.MD SHAHBAZ ALAM )
