Political and Legal Approaches to Human Rights
Democracy | Globalization | Kant, Emmanuel | Locke, John: Political Philosophy| Pufendorf, Samuel Freiherr von: Moralphilosophie und politische Philosophie | Rawls, John | Rights | Rights: Group | Rights: children| Social minimum [Basic income] A number of instruments have also developed more robust procedures to allow for intrusive visits in progress, not only to respond to human rights violations, but also to prevent them. Meetings of the UN General Assembly or UN conferences on specific topics often result in a UN declaration or a non-binding document, also known as “soft law”. All States, by virtue of being Members of the United Nations or participating in the Conference, are deemed to agree with the declaration they have made. The recognition of human rights should also result from an agreement between a State and its people at the national level. When human rights are recognized at the national level, they become first and foremost a political obligation of a State towards its people. The Council of Europe, with its 47 member states, has played a key role in promoting human rights in Europe. Its main human rights instrument is the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (also known as the European Convention on Human Rights). This has been accepted by all Council of Europe member states as a precondition for membership. It was adopted in 1950 and came into force three years later. It guarantees civil and political rights, and its greatest strength is its implementation mechanism, the European Court of Human Rights.
This court and its jurisprudence are admired throughout the world and often invoked by the United Nations and by the constitutional courts of many countries and other regional systems. Minorities are often the target of violence. Human rights standards call on governments to refrain from and protect themselves from such violence. This work is done in part through the right to life, which is a standard individual right. It is also the law against genocide, which protects certain groups from attempts to destroy or decimate. The Genocide Convention was one of the first human rights treaties after the Second World War. The right not to commit genocide is clearly a collective right. It is owned by both individuals and groups and offers protection to groups as groups. It is largely negative in that it requires governments and other authorities not to destroy groups; But it also requires the creation of legal and other safeguards against genocide at the national level. Views that explain human rights in terms of the practical political role they play have had prominent advocates in recent decades.
These “political” conceptions of human rights explain what human rights are by describing what they do. Two philosophers who developed political conceptions are discussed in this section, namely John Rawls and Charles Beitz (for useful discussions on political conceptions and their alternatives, see the collections of essays in Etinson 2018 and Maliks and Schaffer 2017). Human rights instruments reflect our most recent understanding of what human dignity requires. These instruments are likely to always lag behind, as they respond to challenges that have already been recognized, rather than those that remain so institutionalized and rooted in our societies that we still do not recognize them as rights and rights violations. In the Council of Europe, the organisation`s standardisation work aims to propose new legal standards to the Committee of Ministers in order to respond to social measures in order to solve problems arising in member states in relation to matters within their competence. Such measures may include proposing new legislation or adapting existing standards. For example, the procedures of the European Court of Human Rights are evolving to ensure its effectiveness, how provisions on the abolition of the death penalty have been adopted and how new treaty instruments such as the Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings adopted in 2005 have emerged. In this sense, human rights instruments have always been revised and developed. Our understanding, jurisprudence and, most importantly, advocacy will continue to advance, attract and expand human rights. The fact that the provisions of human rights conventions and treaties are sometimes considered inferior to what we would sometimes expect should not be a reason to question what human rights represent as a hope for humanity. Human rights laws often fall short of what human rights defenders expect, but they also remain their most reliable support.