ABSTRACT
Pursuing the so-called political account of human rights, this talk first explains some aspects of the relations between legal and moral rights, and between rights and interests, and then applies the analysis to provide an explanation of human rights. Using the rights to health and to education as examples, it rejects the traditional theory that takes human rights to be rights that people have in virtue of their humanity alone. But human rights are synchronically universal. They are rights which all people living today have, a feature that is a precondition of, and a result of, the fact that they set limits to state sovereignty and justify accountability across borders. Human rights function in the international arena to underline the worth of all human life. They give individual interests a central place in international relations, and have become a distinctive ingredient in the emerging world order where they generate new channels for political action in the international arena. They are by their nature moral rights that call for legal-political protection. Needless to say mechanisms for their protection should be efficient, reliable and fair, or they may cause more harm than good. Moral rights that cannot be fairly and effectively protected though legal processes are not human rights. The discussion of these points highlights the fact that the political account of human rights takes their existence to be contingent on social, economic and cultural factors, and the rights to health and to education are used to illustrate this dependence on factual contingencies. The fast-changing structures of the international scene include changes and challenges in the content and protection of human rights. The paper concludes with a discussion of the difficulties that cultural diversity creates for identifying the content of such rights, and for devising mechanisms for their protection.
I will start with some—hopefully truistic—observations about rights, which will lead to a reflection on the role that human rights play in the emerging world order. I say ‘the emerging world order’ for it seems that we are going through a period of fast transition. If it is sensible to date its beginning to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc, 52then it is clear that its progress is anything but smooth. But I will neither be concerned with analysing the prevailing forces pressing for the remoulding of the shape of our world, nor with predicting its likely future direction. Rather my observations are those of a spectator commenting on one aspect of the process: that concerning the role that claims of individual rights, and the attempts to implement them, play and can usefully play in it.
Recognition and implementation of individual rights are not necessarily the most important aspects of the emerging world order. But there is no denying that its emergence is accompanied by extensive debates about human rights, and intensive efforts to secure their implementation. My discussion of the place of rights in the world order is conducted against the background of this hectic activity. I will use two rights to illustrate some of my points: the right to education and the right to health.
The right to education is recognised in a variety of international treaties. Perhaps the main location is the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1 which in Article 26(1) declares:
Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
53The human right to health appears in Article 12(1) of the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: 2
The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.
My aim is to highlight both the vital importance of individual rights such as the rights to education and health in the world order, and to raise some difficult problems regarding their intellectual foundations, their definitions, and their implementation. I will advance no firm recommendations, though I hope that my comments help point to the direction in which both theoretical inquiry and political activity can contribute to their solution.
