ABSTRACT
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) (UDHR) has several effects. The ‘brotherhood’ spoken of in Article 1 is not, though, the very first biblical example of brotherhood : it is instead an aspirational extrapolation from the asserted fact of the Imago Dei: if humans really are those sorts of creatures, one should behave to them like truly functional brothers. It is most precious for its own sake as a right that inheres in every human being, but it also constitutes a fundamental right, the effective protection of which is the prerequisite for the enjoyment of all other human rights and the content of which can be informed by other human rights. The observation about the right to life being a ‘prerequisite’ to the enjoyment of other rights might sound like a statement of the biologically obvious: the dead do not exercise a right to self-determination.
