Individual Human Rights and Obligations Towards Communities

Abstract

Tensions and oppositions between the individual and community have accompanied the discourse on human rights from the beginning. I want to first recall how in the UDHR (1948) and in the major human rights treaties, the rights and obligations of individuals are regulated towards communities. I then want to investigate whether the talk of “collective human rights”, understood as “third-generation” rights, are of equal value to be set with individual human rights. Against communitarian arguments for the primacy of community-related duties one can stress an expansion of a liberal concept of human rights by the inclusion of justice demands and social human rights. To show that special community needs can be protected and promoted through individual human rights and national collective rights, I used the example of the protection of minorities. Finally, I will explain why human rights are not a comprehensive theory of the good and illustrate with this the limits, and also the original strength of human rights. We should not overestimate human rights, but also we should be aware that a sober understanding of human rights is philosophically reasonable, legally possible and politically of great importance.