Human rights are social protections owed to everyone. Some protect us against the worst sorts of suffering that people can encounter, including violence, torture, and enslavement. Others exist to defend us in case of sickness or unemployment and in conditions of hunger and homelessness. Still others entitle us to fair conditions of employment and an adequate standard of living.
Human rights defend free speech, political participation, and social organizing as means of overcoming abuses of power. They also protect our hopes for the future, including our rights to education and participation in culture and science, self-determination, and development.
Human rights are meant to overcome the worst inequalities among humans, such as racial domination, inequalities of power and wealth, gender inequalities, homophobia, subjection of minority cultural groups, colonialism, and other forms of prejudice and discrimination. In order to understand human rights, we need to understand the inequalities to which they respond. By examining current charters and declarations, we need to determine how they arose from social and political conflicts and struggles against these underlying inequalities. We also must ask how wide these inequalities remain, and whether our ideas and institutions of human rights are at fault.
One of the most difficult things to understand about human rights is how and why they evolve-and must evolve. The first generation of human rights to be recognized in international law in the middle of the 20th century were protections of personal security, political participation, and non-discrimination. To these were added social welfare rights-health, education, social assistance, and cultural participation. At present, a new generation of human rights is coming to be recognized, including women’s rights, children’s rights, rights of peoples to cultural survival and self-determination, and aboriginal rights.
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