Human rights are a set of fundamental freedoms and responsibilities that belong to every person and that no one can voluntarily give up or let others take away. These include the right to life, liberty, and security of person; the right to an adequate standard of living and the enjoyment of cultural and social progress; and the right to privacy.
They are enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its international treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and its Optional Protocols. The international human rights system also has created a range of targeted mechanisms and approaches to prevent specific violations of human rights, such as the Convention against Torture (OPCAT).
People normally look to their governments to guarantee their basic rights, but when governments fail or are persecuting their citizens, people can lose access to those fundamental freedoms. When this happens, people may need to seek protection in another country – and in that situation, it’s important that they be able to enjoy all the rights that are normally guaranteed to them. UNHCR advocates and works with governments to strengthen laws so that displaced people can enjoy those fundamental rights in the countries that host them, as well as in other countries where they have been forced to flee to find safety.
We need to understand how human rights are justified so that we can identify and defend them. But this is not easy: justifications for human rights can be found on a dizzying variety of philosophical grounds. They can be based on prudential reasons; linkage arguments; arguments focusing on agency and autonomy; arguments focusing on basic needs; capabilities-based arguments; and dignity-based arguments. Different approaches will appeal to different types of moral principles, and there is often considerable disagreement between these.
Some people have suggested that the best reason to respect human rights is that they are god-given. But this raises the question of how we get from a claim that humans are born with god-given natural rights to the specific rights in contemporary human rights declarations and treaties. Rights that are plausibly attributed to divine decree must be very general and abstract, but contemporary human rights are highly specific and presuppose a wide variety of existing institutions (see Morsink 2009).
The International Declaration of Human Rights, and the treaties that support it, provide a framework for protecting and promoting human rights worldwide. But in reality, many of the rights enshrined in those documents are not being respected. Rather, they are being violated on a daily basis. The key to addressing this is raising awareness. Educating people on human rights and encouraging them to join campaigns against human rights violations is vital. Human rights groups can also help to inspire, educate and motivate people to act by providing information on human rights violations from around the world, films, speakers, Amnesty literature and conferences. They can also link people with each other to create networks of activists in their local communities.