Human rights

Human rights refers to the concept of human beings as having universal rights, or status, regardless of legal jurisdiction, and likewise other localizing factors, such as ethnicity and nationality.

Human rights controversies

There are a number of controversies regarding human rights including:

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• Are human rights political, moral or legal entities (or all three at the same time)?
• Is there or should there be a hierarchy of human rights?
• Do human rights impede on state sovereignty? What if the state itself has ratified international conventions?
• Should human rights be used as a context for economic or military intervention? (Often leads to a worsening of the human rights situation in the target country)
• Questions of cultural relativism—e.g. "Political participation is not a part of African culture. Who are you to say that we should have political participation?" These arguments can also be made on religious basis: e.g., "In our religion marriages have always been arranged; why should we not continue this practice?" Some arguments claim that human rights policies are a form of cultural imperialism in which powerful countries dictate which rights they consider most important to less powerful countries. The increasing number of third-world states that are party to international human rights treaties has made these arguments weaker, but they have not disappeared altogether.
• Who should hold the moral duty to uphold rights? For civil and political rights, many would answer 'the state'. But in practice, it is frequently one's fellow citizens and civil society who need to shoulder this responsibility. It is not quite so clear who should be responsible for promoting economic, social and cultural rights (do we have a global duty?). This debate mirrors debates between communitarianism and cosmopolitanism.
• Which rights should be defined as fundamental human rights? Should all human rights be considered equal?