Human Rights are complex and contested social practice that organises relations between individuals, society and the State. Comment. (2022, 15 Marks)
The statement echoes Jack Donnelly‘s account of human rights as a social practice. For Donnelly, human rights are not just abstract values but particular social practices to realize those values. On this view, rights exist in being claimed, recognised and enforced. Almost everyone agrees that people deserve protection from arbitrary power. The dispute begins beyond that core.
Human Rights as a Social Practice
- Donnelly’s possession paradox captures the practice. A right matters most exactly when it is not enjoyed, because that is when it is claimed against those who deny it.
- Charles R. Beitz (The Idea of Human Rights, 2009) likewise infers the idea from the global practice. Human rights are norms that make a state’s treatment of its own people a matter of international concern. They are not deduced from a prior theory of natural rights.
Why Complex
- Levels. The practice runs through the UDHR and the Covenants, regional courts, national constitutions and local movements.
- Actors. States, courts, national institutions, NGOs and corporations all take part.
- Kinds. Civil, socio-economic and solidarity rights impose different duties, yet the Vienna Declaration (1993) treats them as indivisible.
Why Contested
- Foundations. John Locke grounded rights in natural law, with the state as a trust that the people may resist when it breaks faith. Jeremy Bentham saw them only as creatures of positive law.
- Priority. Karl Marx (On the Jewish Question, 1843) read the rights of man as the rights of egoistic man, which protect the propertied. Socialist states therefore ranked welfare above liberty.
- Individual or community. Communitarians object that rights-talk presupposes an isolated self, detached from the community that forms it, and multiculturalists press the claims of groups.
- Universality. The Asian values argument and the Bangkok Declaration (1993) challenged whether one list binds every culture.
How the Practice Organises Relations
- Individual and state. Rights are claims against the state, limiting power and requiring provision.
- Individual and society. Rights also bind private actors. The Constitution abolishes untouchability (Article 17) and bans forced labour (Article 23), and both prohibitions reach private persons.
- Rights and duties. Article 51A lists fundamental duties, reflecting Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi‘s view that rights flow from duties performed.
Indian Illustration
India’s rights practice has been driven from below. After the Emergency, civil-liberties groups and public interest litigation turned rights into claims by the poor. Upendra Baxi described this social action litigation as taking suffering seriously. In K. S. Puttaswamy (2017) privacy became a fundamental right, and the Court called for data protection against private as well as state intrusion. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act (2023) followed, but its Section 17 lets the government exempt its own agencies. The practice contests the law that implements it.
Conclusion
The statement is accurate. Human rights are less a fixed catalogue than a continuing argument over who owes what to whom, and contest is how they grow. A practice without a normative core, however, becomes whatever power makes of it. Human dignity supplies that core and keeps the argument honest.