Abstract

Based on today’s compromises with human rights and the numerous violations of them, which for several countries seems to be the rule rather than an exception, this article discusses the cause of the delusions that in today’s politics are attached to human rights. An analysis is made of the nature of human rights understood as something common and universal for all people. On this basis, a division of human rights is proposed, which at the same time means limiting them to perfect, imperfect and adventitious rights. Central to the discussion is the question of how the normative element of human rights should be understood. This article distinguishes between two approaches to the question, where one is identified as a source of current misconceptions about human rights, while the other is highlighted as a possible answer to key challenges facing democracy.

Highlights

  • One cannot understand the one without the other—democracy, as it constitutes the constitutional framework for human rights, and human rights, as they consist in a transformation of the basic principles of democracy into something universally binding and necessary

  • Our main concern has not been to lay the premises for a human rights ideology nor to present a defense for them, but to clarify what we understand by human rights understood as absolute and universal rights

  • From this assumption follow certain necessary consequences for the understanding of the concept of human rights, if it should be a logical and consistent one. These consequences are the common thread in our analysis of human rights

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Summary

Introduction

It is no coincidence that the idea of the natural rights of the individual first gained practical significance with the new popular constitutions in the wake of the American and French revolutions Both have rightly been perceived as liberation movements, one as freedom from an absolute and authoritarian national system of government, and the other as liberation from a foreign colonial power. One cannot understand the one without the other—democracy, as it constitutes the constitutional framework for human rights, and human rights, as they consist in a transformation of the basic principles of democracy into something universally binding and necessary This point is commonly overlooked in today’s political thought.

Liberty and Rights in Democracy
The Idea of Human Rights
Human Rights as Norms
Human Rights and Democracy
The Great Delusion
Conclusions
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