ABSTRACT
Political systems are frequently categorized as free, partly free, and unfree, based on the extent to which civil liberties exist within them. A constitutional civil rights provision is often an emptying vessel if left unattended, that is, if not associated with an appropriate statute law. In most countries, the major problem has not been the existence of anticonstitutional statutes, nor even of statutory lacunae, but rather the unwillingness of the executive to implement existing civil rights laws fairly and of the courts to adjudicate in the spirit of the constitutional norms. A comparative analysis of rights is complicated not only by the problems of differential "values" of constitutional provisions in relation to statutes and varying external pressures but also by the nonuniform distinctions between rights and duties, which in each case may be determined by special experiences and diversities in political culture.
