Human Rights

A. Reis Monteiro

Abstract

1Every community needs rules to regulate living together. Law is a social regulatory device that has become the most powerful driver of Civilisation. Its superior expression are human rights.
2The human rights sentiment and ideal are as ancient and cross-cultural as human suffering and ideals, but the term and concept have appeared and been elaborated only in modern times.
3The belief in the correlation between what is ‘right’ and what is ‘natural’ underlies the ‘Natural Law’ and ‘natural rights’ ideas, which were groundbreaking insights in the genealogy of the human rights concept.
4International Law does not provide a definition of ‘human rights’. Following the most elementary and common one, human rights are rights recognised to every human being simply because of being a member of the human species. Therefore, they are universal, by definition, and are qualified as “equal and inalienable”.
5The Corpus Juris (Body of Law) of International Human Rights Law includes the International Bill of Human Rights, other seven universal core human rights treaties and some hundreds of legal instruments, conventional or declaratory, with general, specific or categorical content, and universal or regional in scope.
6Determining the structure and normative content of a human right amounts to answering the following interrogations: Who holds the right (entitlement: right-holder)? In what does it consist (object: to what is it a right)? Who has the corresponding obligations (exigibility/opposability: duty-bearers)?
7The specificity of each right is essentially determined by its object, the content of which may be described as a normative complex composed of three layers, as it were: minimum content, full content and expanded content, to which correspond as many States’ obligations levels.
8The protection of human rights displays two faces: one turned to the inside, to national legal orders, the other one turned to the outside, to International Law. There are international systems/regimes for the protection of human rights at the universal and regional levels. Also, there are tens of thousands of Non-Governmental Organisations, international and national, devoted to human rights.
9As a World Court of Human Rights is still lacking, there is no veritable Case Law on human rights at the universal level, but there are regional Courts (European, American, African). Their jurisprudence contributes, to a large extent, to define and develop the normative content of human rights.
10The history of human rights is the history of the invention of the Human Being by human beings. Of the revelation of Human Being in human beings. The Human Being is the ethical subject transcending the empirical subjects – ethnic, cultural, national, social, familial, psychological and other ones – with their roots, memberships, cradles, situations and other particularities.
11Human rights constitute an Ethics because their source and sense are the worth and dignity of the human person, whose absolute primacy they consecrate. Here is the most profound and transcendent significance of the Ethics of Human Rights: The Human Being should be a God for human beings. His temple sanctum sanctorum (the most sacred place) is Human Dignity.
12Human Dignity is the most brilliant star in the human rights firmament, the highest lighthouse in the ocean of the human species’ indefinite destiny. It lies at the heart of Human Rights Philosophy and is the spinal column of International Human Rights Law, the supreme value of a New Constitutionalism, the axiological core of the Rule of Law, the embryo of a Law of Humanity. The Human Dignity Principle may be considered as the quintessence of Civilization.
13While human dignity is said to be the source of human rights, it remains, paradoxically, a foundation lacking to be founded … It is submitted that:
1. –Human dignity is the principle and the sense of human rights
2. –Human dignity hallmarks the belonging to the human species
3. –Human dignity is an ethical invention with genetic foundation
4. –Human dignity consists in perfectibility calling for perfecting
5. –Human dignity is inviolable and indisposable
6. –Human dignity is vulnerable and variable
Summing up: Human dignity is a natural attribute, a moral status and a personal responsibility.
The Ethics of Human Rights is an Ethics of the Recognition of Human Dignity as a Principle-Right to have Rights – rights of a living human being – which are fundamentally the Rights-Principles of Liberty, Equality, Diversity, with the consequent Responsibility. It has become the Ethics of Humanity, the Common Temple of the secular faith of the Rule of Law. And as human dignity will never be definitively protected and enhanced, the Human Rights Temple is an endless building, open to the Possible …
Revolution is a term frequent in human rights literature. The Revolution of Human Rights may be summarised as follows:
1. –Consecration of the Individual as the highest ethical-juridical value
2. –Transformation of the International Law and renovation of the Constitutional Law
3. –Reconstruction of the Rule of Law
4. –Inception of a Law of Humanity
We should be realistic without becoming pessimistic: The Revolution of Human Rights is an everyday individual, collective, endless struggle …

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Chapter 2 Human Rights

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Revolution of the Right to Education

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Chapter 2 Human Rights

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Revolution of the Right to Education

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