The Role Of Human Rights

This essay will aim to explain how human rights can be viewed as being political and will provide evidence that will be supported by philosophers, theorists and activists to support this argument. Human rights refer to the "basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled” (United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948). “Human rights are basic rights of human beings that include, access to food, water, space, right to property, religion, and right to self, etc.” (Kuijer 2004).

Tony Evans examination into politics and Universal Human Rights looks into the relationship between human rights and structures of power and proposes that “the current conception of human rights, like all dominant conceptions of rights, is the outcome

“The basic idea is that we can understand what human rights are and what their justification requires by identifying the main roles they play in some political sphere.” (Rawls 1999). Advocators of political conceptions of human rights are often dubious about universal moral rights and concentrate on the provision of sound justifications for the content, normativity, and roles of human rights.

Rawls goes on to explain how political rights are not unconditional and can be overruled by other considerations of state. For example, the right to freedom of movement can be restricted by public and private property rights when intervention orders related to domestic violence are in place and by legal penalties.

According to Pablo Gilabert (2003) the political perspective on human rights claims that individuals are against certain institutional structures, in particular modern states when they have an issue of human rights that include them. The nation states main responsibility is to protect the interests of individuals or groups with mutual beneficial outcomes without having any hidden agendas. The abuse of power is the ultimate abuse of