Discuss the evolution of the theories of human rights from natural rights to collective and environmental rights. (2002)
Rights theory has changed along two axes: who holds a right and what it demands of others. It began with the lone individual asking the state to stand back. It now includes peoples, the unborn and nature. Each stage answered a weakness in the one before it.
Natural rights: the individual against power
- John Locke (Second Treatise, 1689) held life, liberty and estate to be pre-political. Government is a trust to secure them and forfeits authority when it invades them.
- The American Declaration (1776) called such rights unalienable; the French Declaration (1789) called them natural and imprescriptible.
- Holder: the individual; duty: negative non-interference.
Eclipse in the nineteenth century
- Jeremy Bentham recognised only rights made by law. Edmund Burke preferred inherited English liberties to abstract claims. Karl Marx (On the Jewish Question, 1843) saw in the rights of man the charter of the self-interested bourgeois.
- Legal positivism, from John Austin onward, made a right a creature of the sovereign’s command; natural rights became rhetoric, not theory.
After 1945: secular natural rights
The Holocaust showed that legality could serve atrocity. The Universal Declaration (1948) kept universality and inalienability but grounded rights in inherent dignity rather than God or nature. The two 1966 Covenants turned them into treaty law.
Positive rights: from liberty to provision
- T. H. Marshall (Citizenship and Social Class, 1950) traced civil, then political, then social rights. T. H. Green and Harold J. Laski had already argued that liberty without material conditions is hollow.
- The ICESCR asks states to realise work, health and education progressively. The duty turns positive.
Collective and solidarity rights
- Karel Vasak (1977) named a third generation, the rights of fraternité. Decolonisation made self-determination the common Article 1 of both Covenants. The Declaration on the Right to Development (UNGA resolution 41/128, 1986) entitles every human person and all peoples. The African Charter (1981) speaks of peoples’ rights.
- Critics resist group holders. Jack Donnelly holds that human rights belong to individuals and that “development” has no determinate duty-bearer. Will Kymlicka (Multicultural Citizenship, 1995) accepts group claims only as external protections, never as internal restrictions on members. The Bangkok Declaration (1993) showed how a collective claim can postpone individual freedoms.
Environmental rights: future generations and nature
- The Stockholm Declaration (1972), Principle 1, tied freedom to an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being, with a duty to protect it for present and future generations.
- The UN General Assembly recognised a right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment in resolution 76/300 (July 2022; 161–0–8). The ICJ advisory opinion of 23 July 2025 held that states have legal obligations to protect the climate system. India’s Supreme Court in M. K. Ranjitsinh (March 2024) found a right against the adverse effects of climate change in Articles 14 and 21.
- Holders now include unborn generations, and Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution gives rights to nature itself. Correlativity strains: the duty-bearer exists, the right-holder does not yet.
Conclusion
The movement is expansion, not replacement. The Vienna Declaration (1993) made all rights indivisible and interdependent, and the natural-rights core, dignity held against power, still anchors the later claims. The newer rights reach furthest but bind least; they gain force where courts, as in India, turn them into enforceable duties.