Human rights

1. Human Rights: Meaning
• Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings, regardless of race, sex,
nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other status.
• They include the right to personal liberty and due process of law; to freedom of
thought, expression, religion, organization, and movement; to freedom from
discrimination on the basis of race, religion, age, language, and sex; to basic
education; to employment; and to property, and much more.
• Human rights are commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which
a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being. Human
rights are thus conceived as universal (applicable everywhere) and egalitarian (the
same for everyone). These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in
both national and international law.
• These laws prohibit practices such as torture, slavery, summary execution without
trial, and arbitrary detention or exile.

2. • Dr. Justice Durga Das Basu defines “Human rights are
those minimal rights, which every individual must have
against the State, or other public authority, by virtue of
his being a ‘member of human family’ irrespective of any
consideration. Durga Das Basu’s definition brings out the
essence of human rights.
• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR),
1948, defines human rights as “rights derived from the
inherent dignity of the human person.” Human rights
when they are guaranteed by a written constitution are
known as “Fundamental Rights” because a written
constitution is the fundamental law of the state.

3. sYLLABUS
• ....SyllabusHuman Rights Syllabus.pdf

4. Evolution of Human RIGHTS
• What are Human Rights.mp4

5. Prejudice and discrimination
• Prejudice and Discrimination.mp4

6. Human Rights: Characteristics
• Following are the characteristics of human rights:
• 1. Human Rights are Inalienable - Human rights
are conferred on an individual due to the very
nature of his existence.
• They are inherent in all individuals irrespective of
their caste, creed, religion, sex and nationality.
Human rights are conferred to an individual even
after his death. The different rituals in different
religions bear testimony to this fact.

7. 2. Human Rights are Essential and
Necessary - In the absence of
human rights, the moral, physical,
social and spiritual welfare of an
individual is impossible.
•Human rights are also essential as
they provide suitable conditions
for material and moral upliftment

8. 3. Human Rights are in connection with human
dignity – To treat another individual with
dignity irrespective of the fact that the person
is a male or female, rich or poor etc. is
concerned with human dignity.
•For eg. In 1993, India has enacted a law that
forbids the practice of carrying human
excreta. This law is called Employment of
Manual Scavengers and Dry Latrines
(Prohibition)
Act.

9. 4. Human Rights are Irrevocable:
They cannot be taken away by any
power or authority because these rights
originate with the social nature of man in
the society of human beings and they
belong to a person simply because he is a
human being.
As such human rights have similarities
to moral rights.

10. 5. Human Rights are Necessary for the
fulfillment of purpose of life:
• Human life has a purpose. The term
“human right” is applied to those
conditions which are essential for the
fulfillment of this purpose.
•No government has the power to curtail
or take away the rights which are
sacrosanct, inviolable and immutable.

11. 6. Human Rights are Universal –
Human rights are not a monopoly of
any privileged class of people.
Human rights are universal in nature,
without consideration and without
exception.
The values such as divinity, dignity and
equality which form the basis of these
rights are inherent in human nature.

12. 7. Human Rights are never absolute –
•Man is a social animal and he lives in a civic
society, which always put certain restrictions
on the enjoyment of his rights and freedoms.
• Human rights as such are those limited
powers or claims, which are contributory to
the common good and which are recognized
and guaranteed by the State, through its laws
to the individuals.
•As such each right has certain limitations.

13. 8. Human Rights are Dynamic:
• Human rights are not static, they are dynamic.
• Human rights go on expanding with socio-eco-cultural
and political developments within the State.
• Judges have to interpret laws in such ways as are in
tune with the changed social values. For eg. The right to
be cared for in sickness has now been extended to
include free medical treatment in public hospitals under
the Public Health Scheme, free medical examinations in
schools, and the provisions for especially equipped
schools for the physically handicapped.
e.g, Internet Privacy rights have evolved in the last few
years.

14. •9. Rights as limits to state power:
• Human rights imply that every individual has legitimate
claims upon his or her society for certain freedom and
benefits. So human rights limit the state’s power.
• These may be in the form of negative restrictions, on the
powers of the State, from violating the inalienable
freedoms of the individuals or in the nature of demands
on the State, i.e. positive obligations of the State.
• For eg. Six freedoms that are enumerated under the right
to liberty forbid the State from interfering with the
individual.
e.g, Supreme Court Order on Aadhar.
India Pakistan Border.mp4

15. Human rights according to udhr
• Human Rights according to UDHR.mp4

16. Origin of Human Rights
• The United Nations pinpoint the origin of Human Rights to the year 539 BC.
When the troops of Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon, Cyrus freed the
slaves, declared that all people had the right to choose their own religion, and
established racial equality.
• These and other precepts were recorded on a baked-clay cylinder known as
the Cyrus Cylinder, whose provisions served as inspiration for the first four
Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
• Based on these decrees, civilizations in India, as well as Greece and Rome,
expanded on the concept of natural law and society continued to make
progress, leading to another cornerstone of the history of Human Rights: the
Magna Carta of 1215, accepted by King John of England, considered by
many experts as the document that marks the start of modern democracy.
Also known as the Great Charter, this document covered, among other
things, the right of widows who owned property to choose not to remarry,
and established principles of equality before the law.

17. Development of Discourse
When the UN started to prepare the first universal instrument which would
identify, define and proclaim the human rights that should be recognized (by
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) the ideological controversies
relating to discourse on human rights surfaced in highly politicized ways.
Views of the States:
• The Western states defended the individualized civil and political rights in line with their
national laws and political traditions.
• The Socialist states propagated for economic and social rights, loyal to the Marxian
traditions.
• The Latin American states stood behind the Western position since they had similar political
systems to that of the West.
• The Organization of the American States even proclaimed its own Declaration on the Rights
and Duties of Man before the UN proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
• Most of the remaining Third World countries backed both positions, although they were
worried about the political implications of some of the political rights.

18. Development of Discourse
Philosophers and schools of thought on Human Rights:
• For Thomas Hobbes human beings were, by nature, evil-minded, ego-centric, jealous and
power-driven individuals. Although he starts by accepting the existence of natural rights he
concluded by calling for their surrender.
• For Immanuel Kant to relinquish the natural inborn rights amounts to relinquishing being
human. The purpose of civil union should therefore be to protect those inborn rights based
on social contract by ensuring the right of every citizen to have to obey no other law than that
to which he has given his consent or approval”.
• Theologians consider humans as social creations that should live in peace and harmony, and
that have duties towards one another. Since religion also prescribes what the acceptable
rights and duties are, theologians see the talk about human rights as basically a religious talk.
• Liberals and libertarians are interested in empowering individuals by maximizing the
enjoyment of individual freedoms, rather than restricting them.
• Although Marx was in full agreement with Rousseau’s observation that mankind was born
free but lived in chains, he rejected Rousseau’s prescription calling for defending the rights of
man because these rights were framed in the context of the appropriation of private property
inside the political state.

19. Changing Philosophies
• Natural law theories base human rights on a natural moral, religious or even biological order
that is independent of transitory human laws or traditions. The term human rights has
replaced the term natural rights in popularity, because the rights are less and less frequently
seen as requiring natural law for their existence.
• Thomas Hobbes suggested the existence of a social contract where a group of free individuals
agree for the sake of preservation to form institutions to govern them. They give up their
natural complete liberty in exchange for protection from the Sovereign. This led to John
Locke's theory that a failure of the government to secure rights is a failure which justifies the
removal of the government, and was mirrored in later postulation by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
in his Du Contrat Social (The Social Contract).
• The Golden Rule, or the ethic of reciprocity states that one must do unto others as one would
be treated themselves; the principle being that reciprocal recognition and respect of rights
ensures that one's own rights will be protected.
• Soviet concept of human rights was different from conceptions prevalent in the West.
According to Western legal theory, it is the individual who is the beneficiary of human rights
which are to be asserted against the government, whereas Soviet law declared that State is
the source of human rights.

20. Philosophies critical of human rights
• Edmund Burke did not deny the existence of natural rights; rather he thought that the a priority
reasoning adopted by the drafters produced notions that were too abstract to have application
within the framework of society. In contrast to Locke, Burke did not believe the purpose of
government was to protect pre-existing natural rights; he believed the primitive rights of man
undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections, that it becomes absurd to talk of them
as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction.
• Jeremy Bentham famously asserted that the concept of natural rights was nonsense upon stilts. He
identified that absolute rights possessed by everyone equally are meaningless and undesirable.
They lack meaning because if everyone has, for example, unbounded liberty, there is nothing
precluding them from using that liberty to impinge on the liberty of another.
• Alasdair Macintyre argues that every attempt at justifying the existence of human rights has failed.
The assertions by 18th century philosophers that natural rights are self-evident truths, he argues,
are necessarily false as there are no such things as self-evident truths. He says that the plea 20th
century philosophers made to intuition show a flaw in philosophical reasoning.

21. Vulnerable Groups
• Vulnerable groups. Children, pregnant women, elderly
people, malnourished people, and people who are ill or
immunocompromised, are particularly vulnerable when a
disaster strikes, and take a relatively high share of the disease
burden associated with emergencies.

22. Vulnerable groups
• Women
• Children
• Minorities (Religious, Ethnic,
Linguistic)
• Sexual Minorities
• Refugees
• Victims of state-sponsored violence
• Displaced Communities
• Prisoners of Conscience
• Prisoners under trials
• Abortion
• Euthanasia
• Capital Punishment
• HIV/AIDS patients
• Dalits
• Tribals
• Senior Citizens
• Differently-abled persons
• Consumers

23. Women
Following are some of human rights violations suffered by women:
• Sexual violence;
• Human Trafficking;
• Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones;
• Female Genital Mutilation
• Domestic Violence
• Lack of control over Abortion
• Forced Sterilization
• Sexual violence at workplace
• Denial of humanitarian aid and social services

24. Children
Following are the issues, when it comes to human rights of children:
• The recruitment or use of child soldiers;
• The killing or maiming of children;
• The rape and other grave sexual abuse of children;
• The attacks against schools and hospitals;
• The abduction of children;
• Orphans and Abandoned children
• Juvenile Justice
• The denial of humanitarian access for children.

25. Religious Minorities
• Violence and persecution
• Attacks on places of worship
• Restrictions on freedom of religion or belief.
• Deprivation of fundamental rights
• Forced flights from homeland
• Religious conflicts

26. Ethnic Minorities
• Economic disparity
• Ethnic Cleansing and Genocides
• Restrictions on practising culture and language
• No equal recognition before law
• Discrimination based on ethnic origin
• Ethnic Conflicts
• Forced Labours

27. Linguistic Minorities
• Imposition of dominant language
• Prohibition of minority language
• Restrictions on publishing in minority language
• Linguistic Purism
• Exclusion on linguistic grounds
• Decreasing accessibility to government resources

28. Sexual Minorities
• Marginalization of sexuality minorities
• Lack of dignity in treatment
• Deprivation of fundamental rights
• Ridicule in public places
• Alienation by mainstream majority
• Sexual Violence
• Stigmatisation and labels

29. Refugees
• Killings and other attacks on the rights to life, physical integrity and security
• Sexual violence
• Attacks on the rights to water, food, health and education
• Denial of access to asylum
• Deprivation of asylum seekers of rights to fair hearings of their refugee
claims
• Forcible return of people to places where their lives or freedom would be
threatened
• Denial of humanitarian aid and social services
• Denial of access to adequate medical services and education
• Abuse by police, guards, and other detainees
• Syrion Refugee Crises.mp4

30. Human Rights and Abortion
 Access to safe abortion services is a human right.
 Human rights law clearly spells out that decisions about one’s
body are theirs alone this is what is known as bodily autonomy.
 Access to abortion is therefore fundamentally linked to protecting
and upholding the human rights of women, girls and others who
can become pregnant, and thus for achieving social and gender
justice.
 It is essential that laws relating to abortion respect, protect and
fulfil the human rights of pregnant persons and not force them to
seek out unsafe abortions.

31. Human rights and Euthanasia
• Euthanasia ("good death" ) is the practice of terminating the life
of a terminally ill person or animal in a painless or minimally
painful way, for the purpose of limiting suffering.
• In certain countries, the ‘right to life’ deems euthanasia as a
deterrent to the exercise of that right.
• However, Human rights law clearly spells out that decisions about
one’s body are theirs alone – this is what is known as bodily
autonomy.
• Thus euthanasia faces divided opinion over human rights

32. Capital Punishment
• Death penalty or capital punishment is a legal process wherein a
person is put to death by a state in accordance to a crime
committed.
• The death penalty breaches human rights, in particular the right
to life and the right to live free from torture or cruel, inhuman or
degrading treatment or punishment.
• Both rights are protected under the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, adopted by the UN in 1948.
• Death penalty is the worst way of violating human rights, because
right to live is the most important right.

33. Human rights abuse: Dalits
• More than 165 million Dalits in India are condemned to a lifetime of abuse
simply because of their caste.
• Dalits endure segregation in housing, schools, and access to public services.
• They are denied access to land, forced to work in degrading conditions, and
routinely abused at the hands of the police and upper-caste community
members who enjoy the state’s protection.
• Entrenched discrimination violates Dalits’ rights to education, health,
housing, property, freedom of religion, free choice of employment, and equal
treatment before the law.
• Dalits also suffer routine violations of their right to life and security of person
through state-sponsored or -sanctioned acts of violence, including torture.

34. Tribals and Human rights issues
• Australia’s ‘Stolen Generation; children of Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander descent were forcibly removed from their families by authorities,
until as recently as the 1970s.
• Gunmen with hit lists are executing high-profile Indian leaders in Brazil.
Cattle ranchers employ them to stop the Guarani returning to their land.
• The stuffed body of a Bushman, known as ‘El Negro of Banyoles’, was
displayed in a Spanish museum until 1997, when widespread protests led to
its removal. The remains were buried in Botswana in 2000.
• In what are now recognized as ‘Human Safaris’, tourists treat the indigenous
Jarawa of India’s Andaman Islands like animals by throwing them food.

35. Consumer’s Rights
• In today’s globalizing and liberalized society, protection of the individual
consumer assumes greater significance and protecting human dignity
becomes an important cornerstone, especially against multinational
corporations and big business monopolies.
• Consumer protection is often associated with efficient and effective
implementation of regulatory laws in a democratic set-up. The state plays a
major role as the protector of citizens’ consumer rights.
• The Consumer Protection Act 1986 (CPA), recognizes eight basic rights,
namely, the right to safety, right to information, right to choice, right to
representation, right to redress, right to consumer education, right to basic
needs and right to healthy and sustained environment.

36. India’s Legal Framework
• The Right to Equality prohibits inequality on the
basis of caste, religion, place of birth, race, or
gender.
• Right to Freedom encompasses freedom of speech,
freedom of expression, freedom of assembly
without arms, freedom of movement throughout
the territory of our country, freedom of association,
freedom to practice any profession, freedom to
reside in any part of the country.

37. • Right against Exploitation condemns human trafficking,
child labor, forced labor making it an offense punishable
by law, and also prohibit any act of compelling a person to
work without wages where he was legally entitled not to
work or to receive remuneration for it.
• Cultural and Educational Rights protects the rights of
cultural, religious and linguistic minorities by enabling
them to conserve their heritage and protecting them
against discrimination.
• Right to Constitutional Remedies ensures citizens to go to
the Supreme Court of India to ask for enforcement or
protection against violation of their fundamental rights.

38. NHRC
• The NHRC is the National Human Rights
Commission of India, responsible for the protection
and promotion of human rights, defined by the Act
as "Rights Relating To Life, liberty, equality and
dignity of the individual guaranteed by the
Constitution or embodied in the International
Covenants".

39. Repressive Laws
• Section 309 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) criminalized
attempts to suicide and made it punishable.
• Section 377 of the IPC makes consensual sex between two
people of the same sex illegal (Antigay).
• Under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, authorities
can detain a person without any trial, or due process, for
any amount of time, just on a mere suspicion. A person
detained under AFSPA has no right to any legal remedy,
nor is there any provision for compensation for wrongful
detainment.

40. • Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act is an Indian law aimed at
effective prevention of unlawful activities associations in India.
• The Maintenance of Internal Security Act was a controversial law
passed by the Indian parliament in 1971 giving the administration
of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Indian law enforcement
agencies very broad powers – indefinite preventive detention of
individuals, search and seizure of property without warrants, and
wiretapping – in the quelling of civil and political disorder in
India, as well as countering foreign-inspired sabotage, terrorism,
subterfuge and threats to national security.
• TADA Act of 1985 effectively gave the Police, powers to accuse
anyone without evidence, to be an enemy of the state.

41. International Mechanisms: Conventions, treaties and
global bodies
There are ten human rights treaty bodies that monitor
implementation of the core international human rights treaties:
• Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD)
• Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR)
• Human Rights Committee (CCPR)
• Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW)
• Committee against Torture (CAT)
• Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC)
• Committee on Migrant Workers (CMW)
• Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture (SPT)
• Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD)
• Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED)

42. Role of Civil Society and NGO’s.
Civil society and nongovernmental organizations can:
• Lead grass-roots mobilization and advocate that healthy diets and physical activity
for children should be placed on the public agenda;
• Support the wide dissemination of information on the prevention of no
communicable diseases in children through balanced, healthy diets and physical
activity;
• Form networks and action groups to promote the availability of healthy foods and
possibilities for physical activity in children;
• Advocate and support health-promoting programmes and health education
campaigns for children;
• Monitor and work with other stakeholders such as private sector entities;
• contribute to putting knowledge and evidence into practice.
e.g, the RTI Movement.

43. Freedom of expression and the media.
• Freedom of expression is an important human right which
is essential for a society to be democratic. It enables the
free exchange of ideas, opinions and information and thus
allows members of society to form their own opinions on
issues of public importance.
• Freedom of expression serves public debate and supports
a free and independent press, informed citizenship and
the transparent functioning of the state.

44. • The right to freedom of expression is very broad, but it
has limits and can be restricted. This is when the freedom
of expression of one person violates the rights of another
person or the values of society as a whole. In situations
like these, the state can lawfully restrict or punish
expressions that cause harm.
• Freedom of expression gives special rights and duties to
the media. The media inform society on matters of public
interest and create an important platform for public
debate, scrutiny and reflection.
• Therefore, independent media and quality journalism are
considered to be the “watchdog” of a democratic society.

45. THANK
YOU