Human Rights Quote (75): Real and Normative Universality of Human Rights

No doubt the commitment of many countries to human rights is less than authentic and whole-hearted. Yet, the fact of the commitment, that it is enshrined in a constitution, and that it is confirmed in an international instrument are not to be dismissed lightly. Even hypocrisy may sometimes deserve one cheer for it confirms the [...]

Human Rights Facts (46): Religious Liberty

(source)
Religious liberty or the freedom of religion and belief is a human right. It is the right to be protected against coercion in matters of religion, to be free to practice and profess a religion of your choice, in private as well as in public, to change your religion, or to practice no religion at [...]

Human Rights Cartoon (94): Types of Equality

(copyright by Bill Mauldin)
Here’s a short overview of different types of equality (I’ll come back to this in future posts):
1. Equality before the law
This concept is linked to the concept of non-discrimination. Laws must be equal for everybody and should not discriminate between people. Everyone should be protected and punished by the law in the [...]

Human Rights Quote (70): Humanity

The decay of decency in the modern age, the rebellion against law and good faith, the treatment of human beings as things, as the mere instruments of power and ambition, is without a doubt the consequence of the decay of the belief in man as something more than an animal animated by highly conditioned reflexes [...]

Human Rights Facts (36): Support for Human Rights

In a previous post, I gave some data showing the quasi-universal popular support for democracy as the best form of government.
In the current post, I try to do the same for some aspect of other, non-political human rights, such as the freedom of religion, free speech and press, and fair judiciary.
Most of the data are [...]

Human Rights Facts (35): Support for Democracy and Political Rights

Democracy and human rights are first of all a conviction and a state of mind. If the people cannot be persuaded to accept democracy and human rights, then the case is lost, even when there is prosperity, when the culture is beneficial to the development of democracy and human rights, and when the necessary laws [...]

Human Rights Facts (28): Constitutional Universality

The theme of this post is the often difficult relationship between citizenship and human rights. This relationship is difficult because human rights, which are explicitly rights for all people everywhere, without distinctions of any kind, seem to require citizenship, and hence a distinction between groups of somehow differentiated people, for their protection. Without citizenship, it [...]

Human Rights Poem (35): Incantation

(copyright by Mikhail Lemkhin, www.lemkhin.com)
Incantation, Czeslaw Milosz
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above [...]

Marx and Human Rights

According to Marx, human rights are the “rights of the egoistic man, separated from his fellow men and from the community”. They are the rights of man as an isolated, inward looking, self-centered creature

who regards his free opinion as his intellectual private property instead of a part of communication
who uses his right to private property [...]

Human Rights Quote (50): Universal Democracy

We believe that human beings aspire to freedom by their very nature, and that no single culture has a monopoly on democratic values. The tradition of democracy has been enriched by contributions from many cultures, and the development of democracy is open to people everywhere. World Movement for Democracy (http://www.wmd.org/)
I strongly believe in the universal [...]