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Human Rights And The Rights

Decent Essays

Introduction: Human rights are a notion long-debated in history. Two of the three main claims of human rights characteristics are universality and inconvertibility. Universality indicates that human rights are applied equally to every individual, no matter their ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, age, religion, political conviction, or type of government. Inconvertibility means that human rights are absolute and innate. They cannot be removed or denied by any political authority as they are not authorized by the state. Moreover, they do not require reciprocal responsibilities, and are not contradicted by the lack thereof. Nonetheless, universality and inconvertibility are two unrelated concepts. It is one thing to announce that these fundamental rights are applied to the whole world and it is another to think that these rights are unchangeable and inherent. Therefore, even if the global community agrees upon a set of rights that does not mean they are absolute and innate for every circumstance which results in a conflict of rights (O’Byrne, 2003: 27). Furthermore, each property has a set of issues that accompanies it. The first claim is that universality raises a concern due to its excessive dependence on the theoretical concept of natural law. Though it is criticized, the natural law promotes the idea of essentialism which is the notion that there are some inherent, pre-social properties that explain humanity. This is one of the main notions that started the human

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