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Human Rights Speech

Human Rights are the most basic rights which are bestowed on each and every individual. These human rights take up their action rights from the birth of these individuals till their death do them apart with their own rights. Every other human on this planet, irrespective of their caste, religion, creed, gender, nationality, social status or color are entitled to these rights. While their rights are being protected by respective country laws.

To demonstrate the rights and the freedoms of these human beings, a historical document known as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), was set up in the year of 1948. This was indeed the first international agreement on the basic principles of human rights.

Long Speech on Human Rights

Greetings and salutations to all the students and the respected teachers and staff members present,

Today the speech I am about to deliver is about the basic human rights that we deserve. At times, our rights are defined as mere privileges, but I would agree with this notion that our rights are described as to be something more than basic privileges. In simpler words, the entitlement of the fundamental rights which are conferred on every individual is called human rights.

We are born with these rights that are present until our death. All the humans surviving on this planet are entitled to these rights. These rights prove to be effective for each and all, irrespective of the fact of who they are or where they come from or how they choose to live. The reason why these rights are formed is to protect anyone who wants to harm or to violate someone. These human rights give people the freedom to live and to express themselves as to how they want to. Everyone deserves to be themselves and this is supported by human rights.

After the enormous loss of life, caused during World War II, the United Nations signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in the year 1948 on the 10th of December, this was initiated to propose a common understanding for everyone’s rights. Even in the present times, the world is always being sculpted based on freedom, justice and peace which are the rights themselves.

Hence, the 10th of December is celebrated as International Human Rights Day which marks the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Human Rights Include – 

Right to life and liberty

Protection from torture

Fair trials 

Freedom of expression, religion, peaceful assembly

Human Rights are inclusive of many other rights, as we deepen our thoughts the circle will get bigger. Economic, social and cultural rights cover rights which are namely the right to education, housing and health facilities. All these available resources are required to be utilized by the government to achieve them. Treaties are formed to protect the rights of women, children, refugees, the LGBTQ+ society, minorities, the disabled and domestic workers.

All the various principles, declarations and guidelines have been adopted by the United Nations with these treaties to enhance the meaning of these few rights. The UN Human Rights Committee and the UN special rapporteurs are the international institutions that are responsible for interpreting these human rights treaties and monitoring the compliance.

This is the duty of the government who themselves implement international human rights. This is the duty of the government to protect and promote human rights by barring these violations by the officials or stand, also punishing offenders. Also, while creating ways for the citizen to seek help to breach their rights. This is itself a human right violation if a country fails to initiate any step against the private individuals who abuse domestic violence.

Human Rights are Classified as 

Natural rights

Legal rights

Social welfare rights

Ethnic rights

Positive and negative rights

Individual rights

Claim and liberty rights

2 Minutes Speech on Human Rights

Good morning to everyone,

The term human rights are defined as the right to live, liberty, equality and deliver respect for any human being. Our Constitution has a section that follows the Rights and the Fundamental Rights, that provides the people of the nation with their own fundamental rights.

The fundamental rights are the basic human rights of every single citizen of the country, irrespective of their caste, background, their religion, colour, status or their sex. Between the years 1957 to 1949, the sections were very vital elements that were added to the Constitution.

In India, there are six fundamental or human rights that are Right to Freedom, Right to equality, Right against exploitation, Right to Freedom of Religion, Culture and educational rights and Right to seek Constitutional Remedies.

Internationally on the violation of the international human rights or violation of the humanitarian laws or crimes against us, the humanity, the government of a country prosecute the individual, or this can be done by another country as well under the “universal jurisdiction”.

10 Lines on Human Rights Speech in English

There are almost 40 million children who suffer from abuse who should be covered with human rights.

Worldwide, more than 3,00,000 children under the age of 18 are also being exploited, this calls for human rights.

There are around 246 million child laborers worldwide, which is a violation of human rights.

Throughout our history, women have been restricted from exercising their own rights.

Access to the internet was declared one of the basic human rights by the UN in 2011.

Twenty-one million people all over the world were the victims of forced labor.

Leisure and holiday guaranteed with pay is a right for everyone.

In four countries death penalties have been abolished by the year 2015.

In the country of South Africa, a celebration of Human Rights Day takes place on 21st March to pay respect to the Sharpeville massacre.

Domestic violence in many countries is still not considered a crime.

Human Rights are such rights that we deserve to get right from our birth. Many people are not quite aware of their basic rights, in that situation awareness of the same is required so that the people can live an unbiased life.

FAQs on Speech on Human Rights

1. Explain the following rights in brief 

(i)  Right to practice our religion

(ii) Right to speak our language

(i) Right to practice our religion means every human being has the independence to live their religion without any restrictions. This is considered as a fundamental right. The article 25-28 of the Indian constitution guarantees this right. Acc. to this right, all religions are treated equally and the citizens of the country are given equal rights to practice their religion. One of the popular Act related to practicing a particular religion is the 'freedom of religion Act' passed in 1968 in the state of madhya pradesh. This act was passed under the governance of congress. This act also promotem converting yourself from one religion to another. This act had terms and conditions which made sure about the security of the individual. One of the important terms related to this act says that 'no individual must be forced to convert from one religion to another' and must have the freedom to live his culture in our society. 

(ii) The right to speak our language is one of the most important rights in the constitution. Linguistic rights are considered as human and civil rights. This right provides the freedom to choose the language the citizen wants to speak. When linguistic rights are combined with human rights, it makes up linguistic human rights. These linguistic human rights include the right to learn different languages including foreign languages. All of the linguistic human rights are language rights but the vice versa is not true. There are some articles that provide linguistic rights are 

Article 10 

2. What are the advantages of giving human rights to the citizens?

  Providing citizens with Human rights helps in the following ways :

Human rights oppose discrimination and helps in spreading equality among the citizen of the country.

Human rights contribute to making the constitution fair.

It helps in proper classification of the group of people on the basis of different languages, places, sex etc. But, human rights provide independence to practice language, religion etc. 

It also helps to enhance the diversity of the country.

The main aim of providing human rights is to empower the citizens to do their desired work. 

It helps in the overall development of the country. Human rights encourage modernisation and growth.

3. Explain the 'right to education' and its merits.

The right to education is a human right that empowers the citizen to gain education without being stopped by anyone. The right to education act was passed by the parliament on 4 August 2009. It encourages educating children on a mass level. It provides the right to free and compulsory education for all. This right is responsible for increasing the literacy rate of India. Also, it makes the citizens aware about their rights. As it promotes literacy, it also contributes in modernisation and growth of the country.

4. Which part of the system cares about human rights?

In India, human rights were established by NHRC National Human Rights Commission). Since then, the government has the responsibility to ensure the proper implementation of various human rights. Government divided this function into different branches of the constitution. The judiciary holds the constitutional responsibility to protect human rights in India. It protects and studies the situations related to human rights. Along with this, it decides the distribution of human rights. For example - every citizen gets equal human rights. But, distribution of human rights on the basis of needs is done by the judiciary. The parliament has the power to approve or pass the bills related to human rights. Further, the Supreme Court and High Courts hold the power to take action and look after the proper distribution and implementation of human rights. Therefore, the department of human rights is managed by the government and not any private organization.

5. What are the drawbacks of human rights?

 Following are points the drawbacks related of human rights :

In underdeveloped countries or remote areas, many people are still unaware about their rights. This proves that distribution of human rights is not 100% possible in the present scenario.

Human rights acts and organizations need a huge amount of monetary funds.

Corruption leads to lack of human rights. This also disturbes the proper working of the system.

Human rights are still not able to uplift the position of females in society. As a result of this, most of the higher posts are occupied by men and this gives rise to inequality. 

Sometimes, human rights do not prove to be helpful for all the citizens at the same time. 

Human rights acts take a long time to get passed and approved by the parliament. This makes implementation of new human rights difficult.

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How Eleanor Roosevelt Pushed for a Universal Declaration of Human Rights

By: Becky Little

Updated: July 13, 2023 | Original: December 8, 2020

“The future must see the broadening of human rights throughout the world,” Eleanor Roosevelt told a crowd in September 1948 at the Sorbonne in Paris. “People who have glimpsed freedom will never be content until they have secured it for themselves… People who continue to be denied the respect to which they are entitled as human beings will not acquiesce forever in such denial.”

Roosevelt was there to speak about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights , a document whose drafting she’d overseen at the newly-formed United Nations . The U.N. adopted the document that year on December 10, a date now commemorated as Human Rights Day.

The rights enumerated in the declaration were controversial among the U.N.’s member nations, and remain so today. It proclaimed, among other rights, that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.” The former First Lady fought hard to make the declaration comprehensive and later wrote that she considered it “my most important task” during her years at the U.N.

Preventing War by Supporting Human Rights

The 51 countries that founded the U.N. did so in October 1945, just a couple of months after the end of World War II . In the wake of two world wars and the first nuclear bomb attacks , and in the midst of a global refugee crisis, many feared that a more destructive World War III was right around the corner. The U.N. was founded at a time when people like Eleanor Roosevelt wanted to avoid such a disaster and address human rights as a way of preventing war.

President Harry Truman appointed Roosevelt to the U.S. delegation to the U.N. at the end of 1945. By then, she was well-known in the U.S. and abroad. As First Lady during Franklin D. Roosevelt ’s administration from 1933 to 1945, she championed poverty alleviation, access to education and civil rights, and traveled to the European and Pacific front lines of World War II. In April 1946, she became chair of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights and took on the task of drafting a human rights declaration for the world.

Roosevelt’s ideas about human rights and the need to work toward global peace were heavily influenced by her experiences during the two world wars. On the home front, she served food to World War I soldiers and “took the lead in making the federal government address shell-shocked sailors who were trapped in straight jackets in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in D.C.,” says Allida Black, a scholar at UVA’s Miller Center for Public Affairs and editor emeritus of GWU’s Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project .

She saw firsthand the death and devastation in Europe caused by the First and Second World Wars and continued to witness it during her U.N. appointment. In a column published in February 1946, she wrote about her visit to the Zeilsheim displaced persons camp in Germany. After meeting Jewish people who had survived the Holocaust , she reflected : “When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?”

Crafting a Declaration for All People

Creating the Universal Declaration for Human Rights was no easy task, given that nations like the U.S. and the Soviet Union couldn’t agree on what human rights were. Working on it required winning over people who disliked and disagreed with her like Republican John Foster Dulles, a U.S. delegate to the U.N. General Assembly who had protested the Democratic First Lady’s appointment. Roosevelt appealed to his Catholicism to get his support for including economic and social rights—which many U.S. conservatives disparaged as “communist”—in the declaration. And it worked.

“So the most hawkish Republican teams up with Eleanor Roosevelt to go to Harry Truman and the secretary of State to say, ‘We must have economic and social rights in this document; people must have access to food, they must have access to shelter, they must have access to education,’” Black says. “Imagine that.”

Hansa Mehta, a U.N. delegate from the newly-independent country of India and the only other woman on the Commission on Human Rights, also played a significant role in shaping the declaration. She is the one who suggested changing the declaration’s original language in the first article from “All men are born free and equal” to “All human beings are born free and equal,” says Blanche Wiesen Cook , a professor of history and women’s studies at CUNY and author of a three - volume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt.

Even though the declaration wasn’t a binding, enforceable treaty, it served as a model for legislation in many countries. After its adoption, Roosevelt continued to promote and speak about the declaration and the importance of human rights.

“She was very proud of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and she thought that it would be quickly followed by binding covenants,” Cook says. “But she died in 1962 and the covenants weren’t even ready then, and the U.S. didn’t sign the civil and political rights covenant until George Herbert Walker Bush ratified it when the Soviet Union collapsed .”

The United States has not yet ratified the treaty’s economic and social rights covenant .

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6 Human Rights Speeches That Changed The World

Words are powerful things. Put in the hands of skilful orators they have the ability to inspire, heal and rally vast swathes of people. And what could be more worth rallying for than the inherent dignity and equal rights of ‘ all members of the human family’ (AKA, our human rights) ? 

These six speakers advocate for equality, freedom, and dignity. But above all, what connects them is their belief in the power of free speech, and that their own voice can make a difference – and they did.

• Hundreds of inspirational human rights quotes

1. Eleanor Roosevelt, The Struggle for Human Rights, 1948

Let’s start off with the first lady of human rights – Eleanor Roosevelt with her famous 1948 speech ‘The Struggle for Human Rights’

We must not be confused about what freedom is. Basic human rights are simple and easily understood: freedom of speech and a free press; freedom of religion and worship; freedom of assembly and the right of petition; the right of men to be secure in their homes and free from unreasonable search and seizure and from arbitrary arrest and punishment.

Check her out in action here:

2. Martin Luther King, I Have A Dream, 1963

Moving on to one of the most recognisable speeches of the 20 th Century – Martin Luther King Jnr in 1963 ‘I Have A Dream.’

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

His delivery brings his words off the page:

3. Emmeline Pankhurst, Freedom or Death, 1913

Great speeches have a habit of connecting to times of strife. The struggle for women’s suffrage is littered with powerful speeches denouncing inequality – here is one of the most famous from Emmeline Pankhurst in 1913, ‘Freedom or Death,’

Human life for us is sacred, but we say if any life is to be sacrificed it shall be ours; we won’t do it ourselves, but we will put the enemy in the position where they will have to choose between giving us freedom or giving us death.

If you want to listen to it, check out this reading of it:

4. Harold Macmillan, The Wind of Change, 1960

Sometimes the location of a speech underlines its impact. Here Harold Macmillan is addressing the South African Parliament about racial discrimination and slavery in his 1960 ‘The Wind of Change’ speech.

The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.

Check out Harold in full flow here:

5. Nelson Mandela, I Am Prepared To Die, 1964

Four years later in 1964 in the same country, Nelson Mandela was on trial on charges of sabotage and made the following speech from the dock:

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Here is Mr Mandela using the court room as his megaphone:

6. Elie Wiesel, The Perils of Indifference

We’ll end with a personal favourite. Here is Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor addressing President Clinton in 1999 talking about ‘The Perils of Indifference.’

Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor — never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.

Watch the full 20 minutes here:

These are just a small selection of powerful speeches, which speeches would you put in your top ten?

• Check out our guest post on ‘Free Speech and Why it Matters’ 
• For more on freedom of expression and why it matters, read our Explainer here. 
• To read about why we should continue to fight for our freedoms, read RightsInfo’s director’s opinion post, ‘ Evil Progresses Cunningly ‘. 

Harold Macmillan image ©  Chetham’s Library , and Wikimedia used under Creative Commons  Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic Licence.

About the author.

Anna Dannreuther is a barrister at Field Court Chambers practising in public, employment, and commercial law. She is a trans ally and has worked extensively on human rights issues, including at the European Court of Human Rights and with NGO partners.

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Human Rights

Human rights are norms that aspire to protect all people everywhere from severe political, legal, and social abuses. Examples of human rights are the right to freedom of religion, the right to a fair trial when charged with a crime, the right not to be tortured, and the right to education.

The philosophy of human rights addresses questions about the existence, content, nature, universality, justification, and legal status of human rights. The strong claims often made on behalf of human rights (for example, that they are universal, inalienable, or exist independently of legal enactment as justified moral norms) have frequently provoked skeptical doubts and countering philosophical defenses (on these critiques see Lacrois and Pranchere 2016, Mutua 2008, and Waldron 1988). Reflection on these doubts and the responses that can be made to them has become a sub-field of political and legal philosophy with a very substantial literature (see the Bibliography below).

This entry addresses the concept of human rights, the existence and grounds of human rights, the question of which rights are human rights, and relativism about human rights.

1. The General Idea of Human Rights

2.1 how can human rights exist, 2.2 normative justifications for human rights, 2.3 political conceptions of human rights, 3.1 civil and political rights, 3.2 social rights, 3.3 rights of women, minorities, and groups, 3.4 environmental rights, 4. universal human rights in a world of diverse beliefs and practices, bibliography: books and articles in the philosophy of human rights, recent collections, guides to international human rights law, other resources, related entries.

This section attempts to explain the general idea of human rights by identifying four defining features. The goal is to answer the question of what human rights are with a description of the core concept rather than a list of specific rights. Two people can have the same general idea of human rights even though they disagree about which rights belong on a list of such rights and even about whether universal moral rights exist. The four-part explanation below attempts to cover all kinds of human rights including both moral and legal human rights and both old and new human rights (e.g., both Lockean natural rights and contemporary human rights). The explanation anticipates, however, that particular kinds of human rights will have additional features. Starting with this general concept does not commit us to treating all kinds of human rights in a single unified theory (see Buchanan 2013 for an argument that we should not attempt to theorize together universal moral rights and international legal human rights).

(1) Human rights are rights . Lest we miss the obvious, human rights are rights (see Cruft 2012 and the entry on rights ). Most if not all human rights are claim rights that impose duties or responsibilities on their addressees or dutybearers. Rights focus on a freedom, protection, status, or benefit for the rightholders (Beitz 2009). The duties associated with human rights often require actions involving respect, protection, facilitation, and provision. Rights are usually mandatory in the sense of imposing duties on their addressees, but some legal human rights seem to do little more than declare high-priority goals and assign responsibility for their progressive realization. One can argue, of course, that goal-like rights are not real rights, but it may be better to recognize that they comprise a weak but useful notion of a right (See Beitz 2009 for a defense of the view that not all human rights are rights in a strong sense. And see Feinberg 1973 for the idea of “manifesto rights”). A human rights norm might exist as (a) a shared norm of actual human moralities, (b) a justified moral norm supported by strong reasons, (c) a legal right at the national level (where it might be referred to as a “civil” or “constitutional” right), or (d) a legal right within international law. A human rights advocate might wish to see human rights exist in all four ways (See Section 2.1 How Can Human Rights Exist?).

(2) Human rights are plural . If someone accepted that there are human rights but held that there is only one of them, this might make sense if she meant that there is one abstract underlying right that generates a list of specific rights (See Dworkin 2011 for a view of this sort). But if this person meant that there is just one specific right such as the right to peaceful assembly this would be a highly revisionary view. Human rights address a variety of specific problems such as guaranteeing fair trials, ending slavery, ensuring the availability of education, and preventing genocide. Some philosophers advocate very short lists of human rights but nevertheless accept plurality (see Cohen 2004, Ignatieff 2004).

(3) Human rights are universal . All living humans—or perhaps all living persons —have human rights. One does not have to be a particular kind of person or a member of some specific nation or religion to have human rights. Included in the idea of universality is some conception of independent existence . People have human rights independently of whether they are found in the practices, morality, or law of their country or culture. This idea of universality needs several qualifications, however. First, some rights, such as the right to vote, are held only by adult citizens or residents and apply only to voting in one’s own country. Second, the human right to freedom of movement may be taken away temporarily from a person who is convicted of committing a serious crime. And third, some human rights treaties focus on the rights of vulnerable groups such as minorities, women, indigenous peoples, and children.

(4) Human rights have high-priority . Maurice Cranston held that human rights are matters of “paramount importance” and their violation “a grave affront to justice” (Cranston 1967). If human rights did not have high priority they would not have the ability to compete with other powerful considerations such as national stability and security, individual and national self-determination, and national and global prosperity. High priority does not mean, however, that human rights are absolute. As James Griffin says, human rights should be understood as “resistant to trade-offs, but not too resistant” (Griffin 2008). Further, there seems to be priority variation within human rights. For example, when the right to life conflicts with the right to privacy, the latter will generally be outweighed.

Let’s now consider five other features or functions that might be added.

Should human rights be defined as inalienable? Inalienability does not mean that rights are absolute or can never be overridden by other considerations. Rather it means that its holder cannot lose it temporarily or permanently by bad conduct or by voluntarily giving it up. It is doubtful that all human rights are inalienable in this sense. One who endorses both human rights and imprisonment as punishment for serious crimes must hold that people’s rights to freedom of movement can be forfeited temporarily or permanently by just convictions of serious crimes. Perhaps it is sufficient to say that human rights are very hard to lose. (For a stronger view of inalienability, see Donnelly 2003, Meyers 1985).

Should human rights be defined as minimal rights? A number of philosophers have proposed the view that human rights are minimal in the sense of not being too numerous (a few dozen rights rather than hundreds or thousands), and not being too demanding (See Joshua Cohen 2004, Ignatieff 2005, and Rawls 1999). Their views suggest that human rights are—or should be—more concerned with avoiding the worst than with achieving the best. Henry Shue suggests that human rights concern the “lower limits on tolerable human conduct” rather than “great aspirations and exalted ideals” (Shue 1996). When human rights are modest standards they leave most legal and policy matters open to democratic decision-making at the national and local levels. This allows human rights to have high priority, to accommodate a great deal of cultural and institutional variation among countries, and to leave open a large space for democratic decision-making at the national level. Still, there is no contradiction in the idea of an extremely expansive list of human rights and hence minimalism is not a defining feature of human rights (for criticism of the view that human rights are minimal standards see Brems 2009 and Raz 2010). Minimalism is best seen as a normative prescription for what international human rights should be. Moderate forms of minimalism have considerable appeal, but not as part of the definition of human rights.

Should human rights be defined as always being or “mirroring” moral rights? Philosophers coming to human rights theory from moral philosophy sometimes assume that human rights must be, at bottom, moral rather than legal rights. There is no contradiction, however, in people saying that they believe in human rights, but only when they are legal rights at the national or international levels. As Louis Henkin observed, “Political forces have mooted the principal philosophical objections, bridging the chasm between natural and positive law by converting natural human rights into positive legal rights” (Henkin 1978). Theorists who insist that the only human rights are legal rights may find, however, that the interpretations they can give of universality, independent existence, and high priority are weak.

Should human rights be defined in terms of serving some sort of political function? Instead of seeing human rights as grounded in some sort of independently existing moral reality, a theorist might see them as the norms of a highly useful political practice that humans have constructed or evolved. Such a view would see the idea of human rights as playing various political roles at the national and international levels and as serving thereby to protect urgent human and national interests. These political roles might include providing standards for international evaluations of how governments treat their people and specifying when use of economic sanctions or military intervention is permissible (see Section 2.3 Political Conceptions of Human Rights below).

Political theorists would add to the four defining elements suggested above some set of political roles or functions. This kind of view may be plausible for the very salient international human rights that have emerged in international law and politics in the last fifty years. But human rights can exist and function in contexts not involving international scrutiny and intervention such as a world with only one state. Imagine, for example, that an asteroid strike had killed everyone in all countries except New Zealand, leaving it the only state in existence. Surely the idea of human rights as well as many dimensions of human rights practice could continue in New Zealand, even though there would be no international relations, law, or politics (for an argument of this sort see Tasioulas 2012). And if in the same scenario a few people were discovered to have survived in Iceland and were living without a government or state, New Zealanders would know that human rights governed how these people should be treated even though they were stateless. How deeply the idea of human rights must be rooted in international law and practice should not be settled by definitional fiat. We can allow, however, that the sorts of political functions that Rawls and Beitz describe are typically served by international human rights today.

2. The Existence and Grounds of Human Rights

A philosophical question about human rights that occurs to many people is how it is possible for such rights to exist. Several possible ways are explored in this section.

The most obvious way in which human rights come into existence is as norms of national and international law that are created by enactment, custom, and judicial decisions. At the international level, human rights norms exist because of treaties that have turned them into international law. For example, the human right not to be held in slavery or servitude in Article 4 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (Council of Europe, 1950) and in Article 8 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (UN 1966) exists because these treaties establish it. At the national level, human rights norms exist because they have through legislative enactment, judicial decision, or custom become part of a country’s law. For example, the right against slavery exists in the United States because the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits slavery and servitude. When rights are embedded in international law we speak of them as human rights; but when they are enacted in national law we more frequently describe them as civil or constitutional rights.

Enactment in national and international law is clearly one of the ways in which human rights exist. But many have suggested that this cannot be the only way. If human rights exist only because of enactment, their availability is contingent on domestic and international political developments. Many people have looked for a way to support the idea that human rights have roots that are deeper and less subject to human decisions than legal enactment. One version of this idea is that people are born with rights, that human rights are somehow innate or inherent in human beings (see Morsink 2009). One way that a normative status could be inherent in humans is by being God-given. The U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776) claims that people are “endowed by their Creator” with natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. On this view, God, the supreme lawmaker, enacted some basic human rights.

Rights plausibly attributed to divine decree must be very general and abstract (life, liberty, etc.) so that they can apply to thousands of years of human history, not just to recent centuries. But contemporary human rights are specific and many of them presuppose contemporary institutions (e.g., the right to a fair trial and the right to education). Even if people are born with God-given natural rights, we need to explain how to get from those general and abstract rights to the specific rights found in contemporary declarations and treaties.

Attributing human rights to God’s commands may give them a secure status at the metaphysical level, but in a very diverse world it does not make them practically secure. Billions of people do not believe in the God of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. If people do not believe in God, or in the sort of god that prescribes rights, and if you want to base human rights on theological beliefs you must persuade these people of a rights-supporting theological view. This is likely to be even harder than persuading them of human rights. Legal enactment at the national and international levels provides a far more secure status for practical purposes.

Human rights could also exist independently of legal enactment by being part of actual human moralities. All human groups seem to have moralities in the sense of imperative norms of interpersonal behavior backed by reasons and values. These moralities contain specific norms (for example, a prohibition of the intentional murder of an innocent person) and specific values (for example, valuing human life.) If almost all human groups have moralities containing norms prohibiting murder, these norms could partially constitute the human right to life.

The view that human rights are norms found in all human moralities is attractive but has serious difficulties. Although worldwide acceptance of human rights has been increasing rapidly in recent decades (see 4. Universal Human Rights in a World of Diverse Beliefs and Practices ), worldwide moral unanimity about human rights does not exist. Human rights declarations and treaties are intended to change existing norms, not just describe the existing moral consensus.

Yet another way of explaining the existence of human rights is to say that they exist most basically in true or justified ethical outlooks. On this account, to say that there is a human right against torture is mainly to assert that there are strong reasons for believing that it is always morally wrong to engage in torture and that protections should be provided against it. This approach would view the Universal Declaration as attempting to formulate a justified political morality for the whole planet. It was not merely trying to identify a preexisting moral consensus; it was rather trying to create a consensus that could be supported by very plausible moral and practical reasons. This approach requires commitment to the objectivity of such reasons. It holds that just as there are reliable ways of finding out how the physical world works, or what makes buildings sturdy and durable, there are ways of finding out what individuals may justifiably demand of each other and of governments. Even if unanimity about human rights is currently lacking, rational agreement is available to humans if they will commit themselves to open-minded and serious moral and political inquiry. If moral reasons exist independently of human construction, they can—when combined with true premises about current institutions, problems, and resources—generate moral norms different from those currently accepted or enacted. The Universal Declaration seems to proceed on exactly this assumption (see Morsink 2009). One problem with this view is that existence as good reasons seems a rather thin form of existence for human rights. But perhaps we can view this thinness as a practical rather than a theoretical problem, as something to be remedied by the formulation and enactment of legal norms. The best form of existence for human rights would combine robust legal existence with the sort of moral existence that comes from widespread acceptance based on strong moral and practical reasons.

Justifications for human rights should defend their main features including their character as rights, their universality, and their high priority. Such justifications should also be capable of providing starting points for justifying a plausible list of specific rights (on starting points and making the transition to specific rights see Nickel 2007; see also Section 3 Which Rights are Human Rights? below). Further, justifying international human rights is likely to require additional steps (Buchanan 2012). These requirements make the construction of a good justification for human rights a daunting task.

Approaches to justification include grounding human rights in prudential reasons, practical reasons, moral rights (Thomson 1990), human well-being (Sumner 1987, Talbott 2010), fundamental interests (Beitz 2015), human needs (Miller 2012), agency and autonomy (Gewirth 1996, Griffin 2008) dignity (Gilabert 2018, Kateb 2011, Tasioulas 2015), fairness (Nickel 2007), equality, and positive freedom (Gould 2004, Nussbaum 2000, Sen 2004). Justifications can be based on just one of these types of reasons or they can be eclectic and appeal to several (Tasioulas. 2015).

Grounding human rights in human agency and autonomy has had strong advocates in recent decades. For example, in Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Application (1982) Alan Gewirth offered an agency-based justification for human rights. He argued that denying the value of successful agency and action is not an option for a human being; having a life requires regarding the indispensable conditions of agency and action as necessary goods. Abstractly described, these conditions of successful agency are freedom and well-being. A prudent rational agent who must have freedom and well-being will assert a “prudential right claim” to them. Having demanded that others respect her freedom and well-being, consistency requires her to recognize and respect the freedom and well-being of other persons. Since all other agents are in exactly the same position as she is of needing freedom and well-being, consistency requires her to recognize and respect their claims to freedom and well-being. She “logically must accept” that other people as agents have equal rights to freedom and well-being. These two abstract rights work alone and together to generate equal specific human rights of familiar sorts (Gewirth 1978, 1982, 1996). Gewirth’s aspiration was to provide an argument for human rights that applies to all human agents and that is inescapable. From a few hard-to-dispute facts and a principle of consistency he thinks we can derive two generic human rights—and from them, a list of more determinate rights. Gewirth’s views have generated a large critical literature (see Beyleveld 1991, Boylan 1999).

A more recent attempt to base human rights on agency and autonomy is found in James Griffin’s book, On Human Rights (2008). Griffin does not share Gewirth’s goal of providing a logically inescapable argument for human rights, but his overall view shares key structural features with Gewirth’s. These include starting the justification with the unique value of human agency and autonomy (which Griffin calls “normative agency”), postulating some abstract rights (autonomy, freedom, and well-being), and making a place for a right to well-being within an agency-based approach.

In the current dispute between “moral” (or “orthodox”) and “political” conceptions of human rights, Griffin strongly sides with those who see human rights as fundamentally moral rights. Their defining role, in Griffin’s view, is protecting people’s ability to form and pursue conceptions of a worthwhile life—a capacity that Griffin variously refers to as “autonomy,” “normative agency,” and “personhood.” This ability to form, revise, and pursue conceptions of a worthwhile life is taken to be of paramount value, the exclusive source of human dignity, and thereby the basis of human rights (Griffin 2008). Griffin holds that people value this capacity “especially highly, often more highly than even their happiness.”

“Practicalities” also shape human rights in Griffin’s view. He describes practicalities as “a second ground” of human rights. They prescribe making the boundaries of rights clear by avoiding “too many complicated bends,” enlarging rights a little to give them safety margins, and consulting facts about human nature and the nature of society. Accordingly, the justifying generic function that Griffin assigns to human rights is protecting normative agency while taking account of practicalities.

Griffin claims that human rights suffer even more than other normative concepts from an “indeterminacy of sense” that makes them vulnerable to proliferation (Griffin 2008). He thinks that tying all human rights to the single value of normative agency while taking account of practicalities is the best way to remedy this malady. He criticizes the frequent invention of new human rights and the “ballooning of the content” of established rights. Still, Griffin is friendly towards most of the rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Beyond this, Griffin takes human rights to include many rights in interpersonal morality. For example, Griffin thinks that a child’s human right to education applies not just against governments but also against the child’s parents.

Griffin’s thesis that all human rights are grounded in normative agency is put forward not so much as a description but as a proposal, as the best way of giving human rights unity, coherence, and limits. Unfortunately, accepting and following this proposal is unlikely to yield effective barriers to proliferation or a sharp line between human rights and other moral norms. The main reason is one that Griffin himself recognizes: the “generative capacities” of normative agency are “quite great.” Providing adequate protections of the three components of normative agency (autonomy, freedom, and minimal well-being) will encounter a lot of threats to these values and hence will require lots of rights.

Views that explain human rights in terms of the practical political roles that they play have had prominent advocates in recent decades. These “political” conceptions of human rights explain what human rights are by describing the things that they do . Two philosophers who have developed political conceptions are discussed in this section, namely, John Rawls and Charles Beitz (for helpful discussions of political conceptions and their alternatives see the collections of essays in Etinson 2018 and Maliks and Schaffer 2017).

Advocates of political conceptions of human rights are often agnostic or skeptical about universal moral rights while rejecting wholesale moral skepticism and thinking possible the provision of sound normative justifications for the content, normativity, and roles of human rights (for challenges to purely political views see Gilabert 2011, Liao and Etinson 2012, Sangiovanni 2017, and Waldron 2018).

John Rawls introduced the idea of a political conception of human rights in his book, The Law of Peoples (Rawls 1999). 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. In The Law of Peoples this sphere is international relations (and, secondarily, national politics). Rawls was attempting a normative reconstruction of international law and politics within today’s international system, and this helps explain Rawls’s focus on how human rights function within this system.

Rawls says that human rights are a special class of urgent rights . He seems to accept the definition of human rights given in Section 1 above. Besides saying that human rights are rights that are high priority or “urgent,” Rawls also accepts that they are plural and universal. But Rawls was working on a narrower project than Gewirth and Griffin. The international human rights he was concerned with are also defined by their roles in helping define in various ways the normative structure of the global system. They provide content to other normative concepts such as legitimacy, sovereignty, permissible intervention, and membership in good standing in the international community.

According to Rawls the justificatory process for human rights is analogous to the one for principles of justice at the national level that he described in A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971). Instead of asking about the terms of cooperation that free and equal citizens would agree to under fair conditions, we ask about the terms of cooperation that free and equal peoples or countries would agree to under fair conditions. We imagine representatives of the world’s countries meeting to choose the normative principles that constitute the basic international structure. These representatives are imagined to see the countries they represent as free (rightfully independent) and equal (equally worthy of respect and fair treatment). These representatives are also imagined to be choosing rationally in light of the fundamental interests of their country, to be reasonable in seeking to find and respect fair terms of cooperation, and impartial because they are behind a “veil of ignorance”—they lack information about the country they represent such as its size, wealth, and power. Rawls holds that under these conditions these representatives will unanimously choose principles for the global order that include some basic human rights (for further explanation of the global original position see the entries on John Rawls and original position ).

Rawls advocated a limited list of human rights, one that leaves out many fundamental freedoms, rights of political participation, and equality rights. He did this for two reasons. One is that he wanted a list that is plausible for all reasonable countries, not just liberal democracies. The second reason is that he viewed serious violations of human rights as triggering permissible intervention by other countries, and only the most important rights can play this role.

Leaving out protections for equality and democracy is a high price to pay for assigning human rights the role of making international intervention permissible when they are seriously violated. We can accommodate Rawls’underlying idea without paying that price. To accept the idea that countries engaging in massive violations of the most important human rights are not to be tolerated we do not need to follow Rawls in equating international human rights with a heavily-pruned list. Instead we can work up a view—which is needed for other purposes anyway—of which human rights are the weightiest and then assign the intervention-permitting role to this subset.

Charles Beitz’s account of human rights in The Idea of Human Rights (Beitz 2009) shares many similarities with Rawls’s but is much more fully developed. Like Rawls, Beitz deals with human rights only as they have developed in contemporary international human rights practice. Beitz suggests that we can develop an understanding of human rights by attending to “the practical inferences that would be drawn by competent participants in the practice from what they regard as valid claims of human rights.” Observations of what competent participants say and do inform the account of what human rights are. The focus is not on what human rights are at some deep philosophical level; it is rather on how they work by guiding actions within a recently emerged and still evolving discursive practice. The norms of the practice guide the interpretation and application of human rights, the appropriateness of criticism in terms of human rights, adjudication in human rights courts, and—perhaps most importantly—responding to serious violations of human rights. Beitz says that human rights are “matters of international concern” and that they are “potential triggers of transnational protective and remedial action.”

Beitz does not agree with Rawls’s view that these roles require an abbreviated list of human rights. He accepts that the requirements of human rights are weaker than the requirements of social justice at the national level, but denies that human rights are minimal or highly modest in other respects.

Beitz rightly suggests that a reasonable person can accept and use the idea of human rights without accepting any particular view about their foundations. It is less clear that he is right in suggesting that good justifications of human rights should avoid as far as possible controversial assumptions about religion, metaphysics, ideology, and intrinsic value (see the entry public reason ). Beitz emphasizes the practical good that human rights do, not their grounds in some underlying moral reality. This helps make human rights attractive to people from around the world with their diverse religious and philosophical traditions. The broad justification for human rights and their normativity that Beitz offers is that they protect “urgent individual interests against predictable dangers (”standard threats“) to which they are vulnerable under typical circumstances of life in a modern world order composed of independent states.”

3. Which Rights are Human Rights?

This section discusses the question of which rights belong on lists of human rights. The Universal Declaration’s list, which has had great influence, consists of six families: (1) Security rights that protect people against murder, torture, and genocide; (2) Due process rights that protect people against arbitrary and excessively harsh punishments and require fair and public trials for those accused of crimes; (3) Liberty rights that protect people’s fundamental freedoms in areas such as belief, expression, association, and movement; (4) Political rights that protect people’s liberty to participate in politics by assembling, protesting, voting, and serving in public office; (5) Equality rights that guarantee equal citizenship, equality before the law, and freedom from discrimination; and (6) Social rights that require that governments ensure to all the availability of work, education, health services, and an adequate standard of living. A seventh category, minority and group rights, has been created by subsequent treaties. These rights protect women, racial and ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples, children, migrant workers, and the disabled.

Not every question of social justice or wise governance is a human rights issue. For example, a country could have too many lawyers or inadequate provision for graduate-level education without violating any human rights. Deciding which norms should be counted as human rights is a matter of considerable difficulty. And there is continuing pressure to expand lists of human rights to include new areas. Many political movements would like to see their main concerns categorized as matters of human rights, since this would publicize, promote, and legitimize their concerns at the international level. A possible result of this is “human rights inflation,” the devaluation of human rights caused by producing too much bad human rights currency (See Cranston 1973, Orend 2002, Wellman 1999, Griffin 2008).

One way to avoid rights inflation is to follow Cranston in insisting that human rights only deal with extremely important goods, protections, and freedoms. A supplementary approach is to impose several justificatory tests for specific human rights. For example, it could be required that a proposed human right not only protect some very important good but also respond to one or more common and serious threats to that good (Dershowitz 2004, Donnelly 2003, Shue 1996, Talbott 2005), impose burdens on the addressees that are justifiable and no larger than necessary, and be feasible in most of the world’s countries (on feasibility see Gilabert 2009 and Nickel 2007). This approach restrains rights inflation with several tests, not just one master test.

In deciding which specific rights are human rights it is possible to make either too little or too much of international documents such as the Universal Declaration and the European Convention. One makes too little of them by proceeding as if drawing up a list of important rights were a new question, never before addressed, and as if there were no practical wisdom to be found in the choices of rights that went into the historic documents. And one makes too much of them by presuming that those documents tell us everything we need to know about human rights. This approach involves a kind of fundamentalism: it holds that when a right is on the official lists of human rights that settles its status as a human right (“If it’s in the book that’s all I need to know.”) But the process of identifying human rights in the United Nations and elsewhere was a political process with plenty of imperfections. There is little reason to take international diplomats as the most authoritative guides to which human rights there are. Further, even if a treaty’s ratification by most countries can settle the question of whether a certain right is a human right within international law, such a treaty cannot settle its weight. The treaty may suggest that the right is supported by weighty considerations, but it cannot make this so. If an international treaty enacted a right to visit national parks without charge as a human right, the ratification of that treaty would make free access to national parks a human right within international law. But it would not be able to make us believe that the right to visit national parks without charge was sufficiently important to be a real human right (see Luban 2015).

The least controversial family of human rights is civil and political rights. These rights are familiar from historic bills of rights such as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789) and the U.S. Bill of Rights (1791, with subsequent amendments). Contemporary sources include the first 21 Articles of the Universal Declaration , and treaties such as the European Convention , the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights , the American Convention on Human Rights, and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights . Some representative formulations follow:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought and expression. This right includes freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing, in print, in the form of art, or through any other medium of one’s choice. (American Convention on Human Rights, Article 13.1)

Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and to freedom of association with others, including the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests (European Convention, Article 11).

Every citizen shall have the right to participate freely in the government of his country, either directly or through freely chosen representatives in accordance with the provisions of the law. 2. Every citizen shall have the right of equal access to the public service of his country. 3. Every individual shall have the right of access to public property and services in strict equality of all persons before the law (African Charter, Article 13).

Most civil and political rights are not absolute—they can in some cases be overridden by other considerations. For example, the right to freedom of movement can be restricted by public and private property rights, by restraining orders related to domestic violence, and by legal punishments. Further, after a disaster such as a hurricane or earthquake free movement is often appropriately suspended to keep out the curious, permit access of emergency vehicles and equipment, and prevent looting. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights permits rights to be suspended during times “of public emergency which threatens the life of the nation” (Article 4). But it excludes some rights from suspension including the right to life, the prohibition of torture, the prohibition of slavery, the prohibition of ex post facto criminal laws, and freedom of thought and religion.

The Universal Declaration included social (or “welfare”) rights that address matters such as education, food, health services, and employment. Their inclusion has been the source of much controversy (see Beetham 1995). The European Convention did not include them (although it was later amended to include the right to education). Instead they were put into a separate treaty, the European Social Charter . When the United Nations began the process of putting the rights of the Universal Declaration into international law, it followed the same pattern by treating economic and social standards in a treaty separate from the one dealing with civil and political rights. This treaty, the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (the “Social Covenant,” 1966), treated these standards as rights—albeit rights to be progressively realized.

The Social Covenant’s list of rights includes nondiscrimination and equality for women in economic and social life (Articles 2 and 3), freedom to work and opportunities to work (Article 4), fair pay and decent conditions of work (Article 7), the right to form trade unions and to strike (Article 8), social security (Article 9), special protections for mothers and children (Article 10), the right to adequate food, clothing, and housing (Article 11), the right to basic health services (Article 12), the right to education (Article 13), and the right to participate in cultural life and scientific progress (Article 15).

Article 2.1 of the Social Covenant sets out what each of the parties commits itself to do about this list, namely to “take steps, individually and through international assistance and co-operation…to the maximum of its available resources, with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of the rights recognized in the present Covenant.” In contrast, the Civil and Political Covenant commits its signatories to immediate compliance, to “respect and to ensure to all individuals within its territory the rights recognized in the present Covenant” (Article 2.1). The contrast between these two levels of commitment has led some people to suspect that economic and social rights are really just valuable goals. Why did the Social Covenant opt for progressive implementation and thereby treat its rights as being somewhat like goals? The main reason is that many of the world’s countries lacked the economic, institutional, and human resources to realize these standards fully or even largely. For many countries, noncompliance due to inability would have been certain if these standards had been treated as immediately binding.

Social rights have often been defended with linkage arguments that show the support they provide to adequate realization of civil and political rights. This approach was first developed philosophically by Henry Shue (Shue 1996; see also Nickel 2007 and 2016). Linkage arguments defend controversial rights by showing the indispensable or highly useful support they provide to uncontroversial rights. For example, if a government succeeds in eliminating hunger and providing education to everyone this promotes people’s abilities to know, use, and enjoy their liberties, due process rights, and rights of political participation. Lack of education is frequently a barrier to the realization of civil and political rights because uneducated people often do not know what rights they have and what they can do to use and defend them. Lack of education is also a common barrier to democratic participation. Education and a minimum income make it easier for people near the bottom economically to follow politics, participate in political campaigns, and to spend the time and money needed to go to the polls and vote.

Do social rights yield a sufficient commitment to equality? Objections to social rights as human rights have come from both the political right and the political left. A common objection from the left, including liberal egalitarians and socialists, is that social rights as enumerated in human rights documents and treaties provide too weak of a commitment to material equality (Moyn 2018; Gilabert 2015). Realizing social rights requires a state that ensures to everyone an adequate minimum of resources in some key areas but that does not necessarily have strong commitments to equality of opportunity, to strong redistributive taxation, and to ceilings on wealth (see the entries equality , equality of opportunity , distributive justice , and liberal feminism ).

The egalitarian objection cannot be that human rights documents and treaties showed no concern for people living in poverty and misery. That would be wildly false. One of the main purposes of including social rights in human rights documents and treaties was to promote serious efforts to combat poverty, lack of education, and unhealthy living conditions in countries all around the world (see also Langford 2013 on the UN Millennium Development Goals). The objection also cannot be that human rights facilitated the hollowing out of systems of welfare rights in many developed countries that occurred after 1980. Those cuts in welfare programs were often in violation of the requirements of adequately realizing social rights.

Perhaps it should be conceded that human rights documents and treaties have not said enough about positive measures to promote equal opportunity in education and work. A positive right to equal opportunity, like the one Rawls proposed, would require countries to take serious measures to reduce disparities between the opportunities effectively available to children of high-income and low-income parents (Rawls 1971).

A strongly egalitarian political program is best pursued partially within but mostly beyond the human rights framework. One reason for this is that the human rights movement will have better future prospects for acceptance and realization if it has widespread political support. That requires that the rights it endorses appeal to people with a variety of political views ranging from center-left to center-right. Support from the broad political center will not emerge and survive if the human rights platform is perceived as mostly a leftist program.

Do social rights protect sufficiently important human interests? Maurice Cranston opposed social rights by suggesting that social rights are mainly concerned with matters such as holidays with pay that are not matters of deep and universal human interests (Cranston 1967, 1973. Treatments of objections to social rights include Beetham 1995; Howard 1987; and Nickel 2007). It is far from the case, however, that most social rights pertain only to superficial interests. Consider two examples: the right to an adequate standard of living and the right to free public education. These rights require governments to try to remedy widespread and serious evils such as severe poverty, starvation and malnutrition, and ignorance. The importance of food and other basic material conditions of life is easy to show. These goods are essential to people’s ability to live, function, and flourish. Without adequate access to these goods, interests in life, health, and liberty are endangered and serious illness and death are probable. Lack of access to educational opportunities typically limits (both absolutely and comparatively) people’s abilities to participate fully and effectively in the political and economic life of their country.

Are social rights too burdensome? Another objection to social rights is that they are too burdensome on their dutybearers. It is very expensive to guarantee to everyone basic education and minimal material conditions of life. Frequently the claim that social rights are too burdensome uses other, less controversial human rights as a standard of comparison, and suggests that social rights are substantially more burdensome or expensive than liberty rights. Suppose that we use as a basis of comparison liberty rights such as freedom of communication, association, and movement. These rights require both respect and protection from governments. And people cannot be adequately protected in their enjoyment of liberties such as these unless they also have security and due process rights. The costs of liberty, as it were, include the costs of law and criminal justice. Once we see this, liberty rights start to look a lot more costly.

Further, we should not generally think of social rights as simply giving everyone a free supply of the goods they protect. Guarantees of things like food and housing will be intolerably expensive and will undermine productivity if everyone simply receives a free supply. A viable system of social rights will require most people to provide these goods for themselves and their families through work as long as they are given the necessary opportunities, education, and infrastructure. Government-implemented social rights provide guarantees of availability (or “secure access”), but governments should have to supply the requisite goods in only a small fraction of cases. Note that education is often an exception to this since many countries provide free public education irrespective of ability to pay.

Countries that do not accept and implement social rights still have to bear somehow the costs of providing for the needy since these countries—particularly if they recognize democratic rights of political participation—are unlikely to find it tolerable to allow sizeable parts of the population to starve and be homeless. If government does not supply food, clothing, and shelter to those unable to provide for themselves, then families, friends, and communities will have to shoulder this burden. It is only in the last hundred or so years that government-sponsored social rights have taken over a substantial part of the burden of providing for the needy. The taxes associated with social rights are partial replacements for other burdensome duties, namely the duties of families and communities to provide adequate care for the unemployed, sick, disabled, and aged. Deciding whether to implement social rights is not a matter of deciding whether to bear such burdens, but rather of deciding whether to continue with total reliance on a system of informal provision that distributes assistance in a very spotty way and whose costs fall very unevenly on families, friends, and communities.

Are social rights feasible worldwide? Another objection to social rights alleges that they are not feasible in many countries (on how to understand feasibility see Gilabert 2009). It is very expensive to provide guarantees of subsistence, measures to protect and restore people’s health, and education. Many governments will be unable to provide these guarantees while meeting other important responsibilities. Rights are not magical sources of supply (Holmes and Sunstein 1999).

As we saw earlier, the Social Covenant dealt with the issue of feasibility by calling for progressive implementation, that is, implementation as financial and other resources permit. Does this view of implementation turn social rights into high-priority goals? And if so, is that a bad thing?

Standards that outrun the abilities of many of their addressees are good candidates for treatment as goals. Viewing them as largely aspirational rather than as imposing immediate duties avoids problems of inability-based noncompliance. One may worry, however, that this is too much of a demotion for social rights because goals seem much weaker than rights. But goals can be formulated in ways that make them more like rights. They can be assigned addressees (the parties who are to pursue the goal), beneficiaries, scopes that define the objective to be pursued, and a high level of priority (see Langford 2013 and Nickel 2013; see also UN Human Rights and the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals ). Strong reasons for the importance of these goals can be provided. And supervisory bodies can monitor levels of progress and pressure low-performing addressees to attend to and work on their goals.

Treating very demanding rights as goals has several advantages. One is that proposed goals that greatly exceed our abilities are not so farcical as proposed duties that do so. Creating grand lists of social rights that many countries cannot presently realize seems farcical to many people. Perhaps this perceived lack of realism is reduced if we understand that these “rights” are really goals that countries should seriously promote. Goals coexist easily with low levels of ability to achieve them. Another advantage is that goals are flexible: addressees with different levels of ability can choose ways of pursuing the goals that suit their circumstances and means. Because of these attractions it may be worth exploring sophisticated ways to transform very demanding human rights into goals. The transformation may be full or partial. It is possible to create right-goal mixtures that contain some mandatory elements and that therefore seem more like real rights (see Brems 2009). A right-goal mixture might include some rights-like goals, some mandatory steps to be taken immediately, and duties to realize the rights-like goals as quickly as possible.

Equality of rights for historically disadvantaged or subordinated groups is a longstanding concern of the human rights movement. Human rights documents repeatedly emphasize that all people, including women and members of minority ethnic and religious groups, have equal human rights and should be able to enjoy them without discrimination. The right to freedom from discrimination figures prominently in the Universal Declaration and subsequent treaties. The Civil and Political Covenant, for example, commits participating states to respect and protect their people’s rights “without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, or social status” (on minority and group rights see Kymlicka 1995, Nickel 2007).

A number of standard individual rights are especially important to ethnic and religious minorities, including rights to freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and freedom from discrimination. Human rights documents also include rights that refer to minorities explicitly and give them special protections. For example, the Civil and Political Covenant in Article 27 says that persons belonging to ethnic, religious, or linguistic minorities “shall not be denied the right, in community with other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language.”

Feminists have often protested that standard lists of human rights do not sufficiently take into account the different risks faced by women and men. For example, issues like domestic violence, reproductive choice, and trafficking of women and girls for sex work did not have a prominent place in early human rights documents and treaties. Lists of human rights have had to be expanded “to include the degradation and violation of women” (Bunch 2006, 58; see also Lockwood 2006 and Okin 1998). Violations of women’s human rights often occur in the home at the hands of other family members, not in the street at the hands of the police. Most violence against women occurs in the “private” sphere. This has meant that governments cannot be seen as the only addressees of human rights and that the right to privacy of home and family needs qualifications to allow police to protect women within the home.

The issue of how formulations of human rights should respond to variations in the sorts of risks and dangers that different people face is difficult and arises not just in relation to gender but also in relation to age, profession, political affiliation, religion, and personal interests. Due process rights, for example, are much more useful to young people (and particularly young men) than they are to older people since the latter are far less likely to run afoul of the criminal law.

Since 1964 the United Nations has mainly dealt with the rights of women and minorities through specialized treaties such as the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965); the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979); the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2007). See also the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007). Specialized treaties allow international norms to address unique problems of particular groups such as assistance and care during pregnancy and childbearing in the case of women, custody issues in the case of children, and the loss of historic territories by indigenous peoples.

Minority groups are often targets of violence. Human rights norms call upon governments to refrain from such violence and to provide protections against it. This work is partly done by the right to life, which is a standard individual right. It is also done by the right against genocide which protects some groups from attempts to destroy or decimate them. The Genocide Convention was one of the first human rights treaties after World War II. The right against genocide is clearly a group right. It is held by both individuals and groups and provides protection to groups as groups. It is largely negative in the sense that it requires governments and other agencies to refrain from destroying groups; but it also requires that legal and other protections against genocide be created at the national level.

Can the right against genocide be a human right? More generally, can a group right fit the general idea of human rights proposed earlier? On that conception, human rights are rights of all persons . Perhaps it can, however, if we broaden our conception of who can hold human rights to include important groups that people form and cherish (see the entry on group rights ). This can be made more palatable, perhaps, by recognizing that the beneficiaries of the right against genocide are individual humans who enjoy greater security against attempts to destroy the group to which they belong (Kymlicka 1989).

In spite of the danger of rights inflation, there are doubtless norms that should be counted as human rights but are not generally recognized as such. After all, there are lots of areas in which people’s dignity and fundamental interests are threatened by the actions and omissions of individuals and governments. Consider environmental rights, which are often defined to include rights of animals or even of nature itself (see the entry on environmental ethics ). Conceived in this broad way environmental rights don’t have a good fit with the general idea of human rights because the rightholders are not humans or human groups.

Alternative formulations are possible, however. A basic environmental human right can be understood as requiring maintenance and restoration of an environment that is safe for human life and health. Many countries have environmental rights of this sort in their constitutional bills of rights (Hayward 2005). And the European Union’s Bill of Rights, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union , includes in Article 37 an environmental protection norm: “A high level of environmental protection and the improvement of the quality of the environment must be integrated into the policies of the Union and ensured in accordance with the principle of sustainable development.”

A human right to a safe environment or to environmental protection does not directly address issues such as the claims of animals or biodiversity, although it might do so indirectly using the idea of ecosystem services to humans (see Biodiversity and Human Rights . A justification for a human right to a safe environment should show that environmental problems pose serious threats to fundamental human interests, values, or norms; that governments may appropriately be burdened with the responsibility of protecting people against these threats; and that most governments actually have the ability to do this.

Climate change is currently a major environmental threat to many people’s lives and health, and hence it is unsurprising that human rights approaches to climate change have been developed and advocated in recent decades (see Bodansky 2011, Gardiner 2013, and UN Human Rights and Climate Change ). One approach, advocated by Steve Vanderheiden accepts the idea of a human right to an environment that is adequate for human life and health and derives from this broad right a more specific right to a stable climate (Vanderheiden 2008). Another approach, advocated by Simon Caney, does not require introducing a new environmental right. It suggests instead that serious action to reduce and mitigate climate change is required by already well-established human rights because severe climate change will violate many people’s rights to life, food, and health (Caney 2010). One could expand this approach by arguing that severe climate change should be reduced and mitigated because it will cause massive human migrations and other crises that will undermine the abilities of many governments to uphold human rights (for evaluation of these arguments see Bell 2013).

Two familiar philosophical worries about human rights are that they are based on moral beliefs that are culturally relative and that their creation and advocacy involves ethnocentrism. Human rights prescribe universal standards in areas such as security, law enforcement, equality, political participation, and education. The peoples and countries of planet Earth are, however, enormously varied in their practices, traditions, religions, and levels of economic and political development. Putting these two propositions together may be enough to justify the worry that universal human rights do not sufficiently accommodate the diversity of Earth’s peoples. A theoretical expression of this worry is “relativism,” the idea that ethical, political, and legal standards for a particular country or region are mostly shaped by the traditions, beliefs, and conditions of that country or region (see the entry on moral relativism ). The anthropologist William G. Sumner, writing in 1906, asserted that “the mores can make anything right and prevent condemnation of anything” (Sumner 1906).

Relativists sometimes accuse human rights advocates of ethnocentrism, arrogance, and cultural imperialism (Talbott 2005). Ethnocentrism is the assumption, usually unconscious, that “one’s own group is the center of everything” and that its beliefs, practices, and norms provide the standards by which other groups are “scaled and rated” (Sumner 1906; see also Etinson 2018 who argues that ethnocentrism is best understood as a kind of cultural bias rather than as a belief in cultural superiority). Ethnocentrism can lead to arrogance and intolerance in dealings with other countries, ethical systems, and religions. Finally, cultural imperialism occurs when the economically, technologically, and militarily strongest countries impose their beliefs, values, and institutions on the rest of the world. Relativists often combine these charges with a prescription, namely that tolerance of varied practices and traditions ought to be instilled and practiced through measures that include extended learning about other cultures.

The conflict between relativists and human rights advocates may be partially based on differences in their underlying philosophical beliefs, particularly in metaethics. Relativists are often subjectivists or noncognitivists and think of morality as entirely socially constructed and transmitted. In contrast, philosophically-inclined human rights advocates are more likely to adhere to or presuppose cognitivism, moral realism , and intuitionism .

During the drafting in 1947 of the Universal Declaration, the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association warned of the danger that the Declaration would be “a statement of rights conceived only in terms of the values prevalent in Western Europe and America.” Perhaps the main concern of the AAA Board in the period right after World War II was to condemn the intolerant colonialist attitudes of the day and to advocate cultural and political self-determination. But the Board also made the stronger assertion that “standards and values are relative to the culture from which they derive” and thus “what is held to be a human right in one society may be regarded as anti-social by another people” ( American Anthropological Association Statement on Human Rights 1947 ).

This is not, of course, the stance of most anthropologists today. Currently the American Anthropological Association has a Committee on Human Rights whose objectives include promoting and protecting human rights and developing an anthropological perspective on human rights. While still emphasizing the importance of cultural differences, anthropologists now often support cultural survival and the protection of vulnerable cultures, non-discrimination, and the rights and land claims of indigenous peoples.

The idea that relativism and exposure to other cultures promote tolerance may be correct from a psychological perspective. People who are sensitive to differences in beliefs, practices, and traditions, and who are suspicious of the grounds for extending norms across borders, may be more inclined to be tolerant of other countries and peoples than those who believe in an objective universal morality. Still, philosophers have been generally critical of attempts to argue from relativism to a prescription of tolerance (Talbott 2005). If the culture and religion of one country has long fostered intolerant attitudes and practices, and if its citizens and officials act intolerantly towards people from other countries, they are simply following their own traditions and cultural norms. They are just doing what relativists think people mostly do. Accordingly, a relativist from a tolerant country will be hard-pressed to find a basis for criticizing the citizens and officials of the intolerant country. To do so the relativist will have to endorse a transcultural principle of tolerance and to advocate as an outsider cultural change in the direction of greater tolerance. Because of this, relativists who are deeply committed to tolerance may find themselves attracted to a qualified commitment to human rights.

East Asia is the region of the world that participates least in the international human rights system—even though some important East Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea do participate. In the 1990s Singapore’s Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew and others argued that international human rights as found in United Nations declarations and treaties were insensitive to distinctive “Asian values” such as prizing families and community (in contrast to strong individualism); putting social harmony over personal freedom; respect for political leaders and institutions; and emphasizing responsibility, hard work, and thriftiness as means of social progress (on the Asian Values debate see Bauer and Bell 1999; Bell 2000; Sen 1997; and Twining 2009). Proponents of the Asian values idea did not wish to abolish all human rights; they rather wanted to deemphasize some families of human rights, particularly the fundamental freedoms and rights of democratic participation (and in some cases the rights of women). They also wanted Western governments and NGOs to stop criticizing them for human rights violations in these areas.

At the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, countries including Singapore, Malaysia, China, and Iran advocated accommodations within human rights practice for cultural and economic differences. Western representatives tended to view the position of these countries as excuses for repression and authoritarianism. The Conference responded by approving the Vienna Declaration . It included in Article 5 the assertion that countries should not pick and choose among human rights: “All human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated. The international community must treat human rights globally in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing, and with the same emphasis. While the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds must be borne in mind, it is the duty of States, regardless of their political, economic and cultural systems, to promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms.”

Perhaps the debate about relativism and human rights has become obsolete. In recent decades widespread acceptance of human rights has occurred in most parts of the world. Three quarters of the world’s countries have ratified the major human rights treaties, and many countries in Africa, the Americas, and Europe participate in regional human rights regimes that have international courts (see Georgetown University Human Rights Law Research Guide in the Other Internet Resources below). Further, all of the world’s countries now use similar political institutions (law, courts, legislatures, executives, militaries, bureaucracies, police, prisons, taxation, and public schools) and these institutions carry with them characteristic problems and abuses (Donnelly 2003). Finally, globalization has diminished the differences among peoples. Today’s world is not the one that early anthropologists and missionaries found. National and cultural boundaries are breached not just by international trade but also by millions of travelers and migrants, electronic communications, international law covering many areas, and the efforts of international governmental and non-governmental organizations. International influences and organizations are everywhere and countries borrow freely and regularly from each other’s inventions and practices.

Worldwide polls on attitudes towards human rights are now available and they show broad support for human rights and international efforts to promote them. Empirical research can now replace or supplement theoretical speculations about how much disagreement on human rights exists worldwide. A December 2011 report by the Council on Foreign Relations surveyed recent international opinion polls on human rights that probe agreement and disagreement with propositions such as “People have the right to express any opinion,” “People of all faiths can practice their religion freely,” “Women should have the same rights as men,” “People of different races [should be] treated equally,” and governments “should be responsible for ensuring that [their] citizens can meet their basic need for food.” Big majorities of those polled in countries such as Argentina, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Iran, Kenya, Nigeria, China, India, and Indonesia gave affirmative answers. Further, large majorities (on average 70%) in all the countries polled supported UN efforts to promote the human rights set out in the Universal Declaration. Unfortunately, popular acceptance of human rights ideas has not, however, prevented a recent slide in many of these same countries towards authoritarianism.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

Other Internet Resources

• Georgetown Law Library Human Rights Law Research Guide
• United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
• University of Minnesota Human Rights Library .
• Francisco Suarez (1548–1617), entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
• Human Rights entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .

democracy | globalization | Kant, Immanuel | Locke, John: political philosophy | Pufendorf, Samuel Freiherr von: moral and political philosophy | Rawls, John | rights | rights: group | rights: of children | social minimum [basic income]

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The assistance of Adam Etinson, Pablo Gilabert, and Erin Sperry is acknowledged with gratitude.

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A demonstrator raises a sign that says, "Human rights are women's rights" at the Women's March in Los Angeles in 2018. Though the concept had long been controversial, the United Nations declared that women's rights are human rights in 1995 at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.

• HISTORY & CULTURE

'Women's Rights are Human Rights,' 25 years on

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s speech at a UN conference propelled this idea into the mainstream after centuries of society sidelining gender equality as “women’s issues.”

When Hillary Rodham Clinton approached the podium at a United Nations conference on women in September 1995 in Beijing, she faced an uncertain audience. Only a few people had read the speech, which was a well-guarded secret even to high-ranking members of the president’s cabinet. “Nobody knew what to expect,” recalls Melanne Verveer , the then first lady’s chief of staff, who later served as the first U.S. Ambassador for Global Women’s Issues when Clinton became secretary of state.

Twenty-five years later, a single phrase from Clinton’s speech has entered mainstream parlance: “Women’s rights are human rights.” The concept wasn’t new. But the excitement and energy that Clinton’s speech generated at the Fourth World Conference on Women helped elevate the idea to one that fuels modern feminism and international efforts to achieve gender parity.

Women’s rights advocates have long argued that gender equality should be a human right—but were thwarted for years by those who claimed their rights were subordinate to those of men. During the infancy of the American feminist movement of the 1830s, abolitionists and women’s rights advocates tussled over whether it was more important to seek freedom for enslaved people or equality for women. As women pushed for their rights to vote, access educational opportunities, and own property, male abolitionists like Theodore Weld urged them to wait, arguing that they should first fight for the abolition of slavery as a matter of human rights.

Some women, such as educator Catharine Beecher , argued that women deserved rights because of their morality—as they were uniquely positioned to edify and enlighten men—not their humanity. She cautioned that their roles in public life should not extend into equality in the home. In response, abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Angelina Grimké wrote , “I recognize no rights but human rights,” noting that a society that didn’t give women power or a political voice violated their innate human rights. She was just one of a group of women who invoked the idea throughout the 19 th century. (Grimké later went on to marry Weld, who was her mentor.)

In the 1970s, the idea resurfaced as so-called second-wave feminists, who believed women should have access to full societal and legal rights, attempted to put women’s rights on the international agenda. In many countries, there was no consensus that women had a right to equal partnership in marriage, power over their finances, an equal education, or a life free of sexual assault or harassment. Between 1975 and 1995, the United Nations convened four landmark Conferences on Women that made gender parity a global priority. ( Here are the best and worst countries to be a woman. )

The first conference, held in Mexico City in 1975, recognized women’s equality. Eighty-nine of the 133 nations that participated adopted a framework to help women gain equal access to all facets of society; several western nations abstained , and the United States opposed the framework. In 1980, a follow-up conference in Copenhagen called for stronger protections for women, with an emphasis on property ownership, child custody, and a restructuring of inheritance laws. A third in Nairobi in 1985 called attention to violence against women. But though these conferences brought women’s issues to the international stage, each one fell short because of a lack of consensus and failure to implement the adopted platforms. By 1995, global women’s leaders had agreed it was time to create an action plan to guarantee equality for women.

FREE BONUS ISSUE

Slated for Beijing in September 1995, the Fourth World Conference on Women took place in an atmosphere of intense international condemnation of the host nation’s treatment of its own citizens. Human rights groups and governments criticized China’s history of political imprisonment, torture, detention, and denial of religious freedom. The nation’s one-child policy , which put family planning decisions under state control, came under particular fire.

Women watch Hillary Rodham Clinton speak to the abuse against women at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. Her call for women's rights to be considered human rights has since become mainstream.

News that Clinton would attend and speak at the meeting prompted an American outcry. “There were serious efforts not to make [the speech] happen,” Verveer recalls. “You had a cacophony of voices that were trying to keep this from being meaningful or successful.” The first lady faced outrage from human rights advocates who objected to the China visit on principle, conservative politicians who disapproved of her outspoken feminism, and people who worried the speech could threaten the bilateral relationship between the U.S. and China.

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“I wanted to push the envelope as far as I could for girls and women,” Clinton said in a virtual public event hosted on September 10 by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security , of which Verveer is the executive director. ( A century after women’s suffrage in the U.S., the fight for equality isn’t over. )

On September 5, 1995, the second day of the conference, Clinton took the podium in front of representatives from all over the world. As Clinton spoke, Verveer watched the delegates’ faces closely. The speech cited a “litany of violations against women,” including rape, female genital mutilation, dowry burnings, and domestic violence—which Clinton labeled as human rights violations. She excoriated those who forcibly sterilized women and condemned those who restricted civil liberties, a jab at China, which restricted news coverage of the event.

The room was “filled with women who were in the trenches of those issues,” says Verveer. “The audience was completely pulled into their struggle.” The mostly female delegation applauded and cheered during the 20-minute speech, sometimes even pounding their fists on the tables to underscore their approval.

“The reaction was extraordinary,” Verveer says. On September 15, the phrase “women’s rights are human rights” was unanimously adopted as part of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action , which defined 12 areas—including education, health, economic participation, and the environment—in need of urgent international action. The document still governs the global agenda for women’s issues and is credited with helping narrow the education gap, improve maternal health, and reduce violence against women. ( Around the world, women are taking charge of their futures. )

Fourth World Conference on Women participants (from left) Benedita Da Silva of Brazil, Vuyiswa Bongile Keyi of Canada, and Silvia Salley of the United States cheer at the conclusion of the "Women of Color" press briefing where they stated that racism was not adequately addressed in the declaration.

Today, the idea that human rights and women’s rights are synonymous is considered mainstream. “I have rarely seen a single message carry such [an] important meaning and have such a durable life,” former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said at the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security event commemorating the anniversary.

But the work of gender equality is not yet done—and 25 years after Beijing, women still face systemic inequities and gaps in terms of safety, economic and political mobility, and more. “Girls need to know that they stand on the shoulders of other people who struggled to gain the rights they enjoy today,” says Verveer. “They need to play a role in ensuring the work goes on. There has been progress, but there is a long journey ahead.”

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• Speech Writing /

1-Minute Speech on Human Rights for Students

• Updated on  
• Nov 29, 2023

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, ‘A right delayed is a right denied.’ He led the American Civil Rights Movement for equal rights for African Americans in the USA. In 1964, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for fighting against racial discrimination using non-violence, which he learned from Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology. He encouraged the mass participation of people who collectively worked for equal rights. This was just one example where people actively participated in fighting for their human rights. Below we have highlighted a speech on human rights for students which will offer you insights about them.

Table of Contents

• 1 What are Human Rights?
• 2 1-Minute Speech on Human Rights
• 3  Paragraph on Human Rights
• 4 8 Quotes on Human Rights

Also Read: 160+ Best and Easy English Speech Topics for Students

What are Human Rights?

In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). UDHR includes a broad range of civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights essential to human well-being. The nature of these rights is universal; they are offered to every human being regardless of nationality, ethnicity, religion, gender, or any other differences. 

Also Read: Essay on Feminism for Students

1-Minute Speech on Human Rights

‘My warm regards to everyone present here. I stand before you to present my ‘Speech on Human Rights.’ Today, we can freely travel anywhere in the world, obviously with valid documents. Well, this was not the case 50 years ago. Human rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr., Malala Yousufzai, Rosa Parks, and hundreds of others have bravely fought for human rights.’

‘Some of the basic human rights are the right to life and liberty, the right to work and education, freedom from slavery and torture, and freedom of opinion and expression. These are not just abstract ideals; they are legal rights written under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For a fruitful and sustained future, it is our duty to collectively protect and promote these rights equally among all people.’

‘To fully implement human rights, we must advocate, educate, and empower individuals to stand up against injustice. A world of 8 billion population cannot live in harmony without human rights. Therefore, to fully implement human rights, comprehensive and sustained efforts are required.’

Also Read: Essay on Human Rights

Also Read: Social Media Bane or Boon: Short and Long Speech for Students

 Paragraph on Human Rights

Also Read: Speech on the Importance of English in 250 to 500 Words

8 Quotes on Human Rights

Here are 8 quotes on human rights. Feel free to add them to your speech on human rights.

• ‘Human rights mean the right to good health, a dignified life, and respect for the will of everyday people.’ – Denia Castillo
• ‘Human rights mean no one sleeps hungry.’ – Hassan Abdille
• To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.’ – Nelson Mandela
• ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.’ – Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• ‘Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being’s entitlement by virtue of his humanity.’ – Mother Teresa
• “The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.’ – John F. Kennedy
• ‘We declare that human rights are for all of us, all the time: whoever we are and wherever we are from; no matter our class, our opinions, our sexual orientation.’ – Archbishop Desmond Tutu
• ‘Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free.’ – 14th Dalai Lama

Ans: Human rights are basic universal rights that are offered to every human being to live a fruitful life. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) includes a broad range of civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights essential to human well-being.

Ans: Human rights were adopted by the UNGA in 1948 when Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the assembly. He passed the UDHR Resolution.

Ans: Human rights are important in this aspect as they protect the dignity and integrity of every human being on equal terms. 

Related Articles

For more information on such interesting speech topics for your school, visit our speech writing page and follow Leverage Edu .

Shiva Tyagi

With an experience of over a year, I've developed a passion for writing blogs on wide range of topics. I am mostly inspired from topics related to social and environmental fields, where you come up with a positive outcome.

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First Principles on Human Rights: Freedom of Speech

Authors: Michael Farris and Paul Coleman

Key Takeaways

The U.N. has a confusing approach to freedom of speech. If free speech is expected to flourish, international laws should be reformed—and the U.S. must take action.

The U.S. and other nations should urge U.N. Secretary-General Guterres to rescind the U.N. Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech to protect free speech.

Restrictions on speech should only be valid when that speech incites imminent violence or other criminal acts.

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Two requests were recently received for legal assistance. One was from a lawyer in an Islamic-majority nation. His client was being prosecuted for allegedly defaming the prophet of Islam, Mohammed. He has subsequently been sentenced to death. The second was from a lawyer in Canada. A street preacher had been arrested for quoting perhaps the most famous verse in the Bible—John 3:16—which speaks of God’s love for the whole world. He dared to say these words at a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) outdoor event—and now faces criminal penalties.

Although the details of the national laws vary, as do the political affiliations and worldviews of the lawmakers who enact restrictive statutes, these and countless other examples reveal a worldwide assault on freedom of speech. In many nations, draconian blasphemy laws exist with significant penalties, including the death penalty. Such laws are often used to settle scores between neighbors, attack opponents, and advance government authority. And in more recent times, loosely worded anti-terror, anti-extremism, or national security laws are being used to silence political opponents and any person or group considered an enemy of the state.

In the West, “hate speech” REF laws are the biggest threat to freedom of speech. REF “Hate speech” laws are extremely vaguely worded, and there is no universally agreed legal definition of “hate speech.” As discussed below, the United Nations (U.N.) has recently launched a major new initiative to combat “hate speech”—spearheaded by the Secretary-General himself. The opening report states:

There is no international legal definition of hate speech, and the characterization of what is “hateful” is controversial and disputed. In the context of this document , the term hate speech is understood as any kind of communication in speech, writing or behaviour, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language. REF

Similar statements can be found by all major international actors. For example, the Fundamental Rights Agency of the European Union once stated in a report that the “term ‘hate speech,’ as used in this section , includes a broader spectrum of verbal acts…[including] disrespectful public discourse.” REF

“Hate speech” laws are vaguely worded, largely subjective, often criminal in nature, and arbitrarily enforced. Moreover, these laws need not require falsehood, need not require an actual victim, and protect some groups of people and not others.

And a fact sheet produced by the European Court of Human Rights has explained:

The identification of expressions that could be qualified as “hate speech” is sometimes difficult because this kind of speech does not necessarily manifest itself through the expression of hatred or of emotions. It can also be concealed in statements which at a first glance may seem to be rational or normal. REF

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization summarized the situation as follows: “Hate speech is a broad and contested term…. [T]he possibility of reaching a universally shared definition seems unlikely.” REF Given that there is no universally agreed definition of “hate speech,” identifying so-called hate speech laws is problematic. Nevertheless, some conclusions can be drawn based on a study of such laws across the West. REF

Most of these laws criminalize speech that allegedly does one or more of the following: hates, offends, insults, belittles, vilifies, ridicules, despises, discriminates, or violates the dignity of those belonging to one or more of the following groups: sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, nationality, language, ethnic origin, social status, religion, belief, political affiliation, age, and disability. In some instances, the state itself can be a victim of “hate speech,” as well as religious dogma per se (not just religious people).

Hence, there is no identifiable and agreed-upon category of speech that can be labelled “hate speech”; so-called hate-speech laws are powerful tools in the hands of those who wish to censor unpopular opinions, silence political opposition, and remove irritating voices that speak out against the orthodoxies of the day. To choose one typical example among many, Chapter 11, Section 10 of the Finnish Criminal Code states the following:

A person who makes available to the public or otherwise spreads among the public or keeps available for the public information, an expression of opinion or another message where a certain group is threatened, defamed or insulted on the basis of its race, skin colour, birth status, national or ethnic origin, religion or belief, sexual orientation or disability or a comparable basis, shall be sentenced for ethnic agitation to a fine or to imprisonment for at most two years. REF

“Hate speech” laws are powerful tools in the hands of those who wish to censor unpopular opinions, silence political opposition, and remove irritating voices that speak out against the orthodoxies of the day.

It is under this provision that a leading member of the Finnish Parliament, and former Minister of the Interior, is now facing four separate police investigations for alleged “hate speech.” Päivi Räsänen’s alleged crime? Tweeting an image of some Bible texts and writing a church booklet on sexual ethics 16 years ago . REF

Such cases are becoming common across Europe and the West. Catholic cardinals have been investigated for preaching homilies, journalists have been arrested and fined, and private conversations among citizens have resulted in criminal prosecutions.

In the face of global assaults to freedom of speech, never has the need for free speech champions been greater. And the U.N. is well-placed to be at the forefront of such efforts. It has a number of bodies and mechanisms that can promote freedom of expression, as well as foundational human rights treaties with strong protections for freedom of expression.

However, this is only half the story. The human rights treaties also contain language that encourages states to censor speech. U.N. bodies and mechanisms often encourage state-censorship. And many U.N. member states use the U.N. system to advance their censorious agenda globally.

As this essay makes clear, at the heart of the U.N. system is a contradictory—even schizophrenic—approach to freedom of expression, with both a pro–free speech and pro-censorship approach in existence at the same time. This can be traced back to the very founding of the U.N., and it reverberates through to the present day.

Before tracing the historical debates that have led to this present-day schizophrenia, it is first worth considering why a robust defense of free speech is necessary.

I. In Defense of Freedom of Speech

Preventing the U.N. from tipping toward censorship is of pressing importance given the deep moral and political significance of free speech. Free speech is of such great significance that defenses of the right to speak freely are manifold. These defenses are, broadly speaking, either pragmatic or principled , meaning that they appeal either to the pragmatic reasons for protecting speech or to moral principles why states lack authority to restrict certain kinds of speech.

Defenses from the two categories are often used in tandem, as by John Stuart Mill, one of the most famous and influential defenders of free speech. Mill makes the pragmatic argument that protections for speech are an indispensable aid to our search for truth, since “ history teems with instances of truth put down by persecution .” REF

At the same time, Mill proposes a principled understanding of the limits of state authority: The state is only permitted to interfere with actions in order to prevent “evil” or “injury” to others, leaving an expansive “region of human liberty” that includes, first, “liberty of conscience in the most comprehensive sense” and second, “the liberty of expressing and publishing opinions.” REF This liberty to speak and publish, Mill reasons, “almost is of as much importance as the liberty of thought itself” and “is practically inseparable from it” as it rests “in great part on the same reasons.” REF

In this liberal tradition, the right to free speech is, along with other natural rights, grounded in the idea that “every man has property in his own person,” to use Locke’s phraseology.

As in Mill, so also in general, free speech defenses—especially those that seek a principled reason for limiting state authority over speech—rely on a distinction between actions and speech. This speech–act distinction is quite old and finds nuanced treatment even in Montesquieu. As Montesquieu put it, laws ought only seek to punish “overt acts,” and “words do not constitute an overt act; they remain only in idea.” REF Because speech is not action but only ideas expressed aloud, Montesquieu argued, laws against speech tend to be vague and therefore to give the state broad, arbitrary power. REF Thus Montesquieu offers a principled reason based in distinction between speech and action to caution against policing speech.

This same interest in the distinctive characteristics of speech appears in what is perhaps the most important of the historic defenses of free speech, namely, the argument from natural law and natural rights. Certainly natural rights arguments, based in early modern theories of natural law, “powerfully shaped the way that the Founders thought about the purposes and structure of government.” REF The protections for free speech enshrined in the First Amendment emerged from the influence of such theorists of natural rights as William Blackstone, Benedict Spinoza, and John Locke. REF In this liberal tradition, the right to free speech is, along with other natural rights, grounded in the idea that “every man has property in his own person,” to use Locke’s phraseology. REF

Locke’s argument was that natural law gives us each certain duties to God that allow us to claim certain natural rights against all worldly powers. These natural rights include, famously, life, liberty, and property. We have property in ourselves because, Locke argued, we ultimately each belong to God and have been deputized by God, “sent into the world by his order and about his business.” REF God has given us certain duties to perform, authorizing us to execute the natural law to which he will hold us accountable.

Because we are accountable to God for performance of our duties under the natural law, we cannot allow ourselves to fall under tyranny. Tyrannical rule threatens to take away life and freedom, both of which are indispensable to our efforts to serve God. REF Watchfulness against tyranny includes carefully adjudging what aspects of life fall under the respective jurisdictions of “the civil governor, which is the ruler” and “the individual governor, which is conscience.” REF

“Each individual alone,” Locke believed, “is responsible for their own salvation,” and therefore the ruler must allow citizens to teach publicly any doctrine that does not by its very nature “plainly undermine the very foundations of society.” REF Locke’s point was put in more explicit terms by Spinoza, who wrote that individuals hold an “indefeasible natural right” to free speech, except when the opinions expressed “by their very nature nullify the [social] compact.” REF

While the state has legitimate authority to regulate our actions insofar as doing so is necessary to prevent us from taking away the life, liberty, or property of others, there is a strong presumption that individuals have authority to speak as they will.

The natural rights tradition, therefore, bequeaths to us the idea that we all, simply because we are humans, have an indefeasible and inalienable right to speech that, while not entirely without limits, is nevertheless quite substantial. We have the right to speak freely because to speak is not to take action but only to express our ideas. And our ideas we cannot possibly allow any outside power to regulate, since God himself will hold us accountable for our ideas and beliefs.

Thus, while the state has legitimate authority to regulate our actions insofar as doing so is necessary to prevent us from taking away the life, liberty, or property of others, there is a strong presumption that individuals have authority to speak as they will. The state must therefore tread carefully when it seeks to interfere with speech—since in regulating speech the state can easily undermine the very liberty it exists to secure.

II. Free Speech Versus Censorship at the U.N.’s Founding

Principled and pragmatic defenses of freedom of speech were deployed by Western nations at the very founding of the U.N.—and both were met with significant opposition from Communist-led nations that placed a far greater emphasis on the reaches of state power. A two-decade-long debate unfolded, the results of which can be seen today.

With the launch of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945, work soon began on an international bill of human rights—a major priority for the U.S. and many other Western nations following the horrors of World War II. Three years later, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was launched, followed by a steady succession of international and regional human rights treaties, most of which enshrine the fundamental right to freedom of expression. REF However, provisions were also adopted within international human rights treaties that appear to undermine this fundamental right by obligating states to prohibit the impossibly vague and subjective notion of “advocacy of…hatred”—known today as “hate speech.”

This inherent conflict reflects the political and historical circumstances in which the core documents were drafted. REF Moreover, this conflict continues through to the present and helps explain why parts of the U.N. machinery herald freedom of expression as a fundamental human right and lament restrictions on this right, while other bodies (or sometimes even the same U.N. body) call for greater restrictions on this right. And it explains why, in 2019, the U.N. Secretary-General can launch a strategy to combat (undefined and arguably undefinable) “pejorative or discriminatory language”—while at the same time saying this in no way undermines freedom of expression. REF

As discussed below, at the heart of international law lies an insurmountable challenge that the U.N. seeks to navigate: the protection of the “right kind of speech” and prohibition of the “wrong kind of speech”—even though such categories are wholly subjective and impossible to determine.

At the start of the international human rights project, freedom of speech was considered by many nations to be an absolutely essential freedom that must be protected in any international human rights treaty. For example, in 1946, the U.N. General Assembly declared in its very first session: “Freedom of information is a fundamental human right and is the touchstone of all the freedoms to which the United Nations is consecrated .” REF And the preamble to the UDHR states, “[T]he advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief…has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people.” REF

At the heart of international law lies an insurmountable challenge that the U.N. seeks to navigate: the protection of the “right kind of speech” and prohibition of the “wrong kind of speech”—even though such categories are wholly subjective and impossible to determine.

On the other hand, there were consistent voices from the Soviet Union and other communist-led states that unbridled freedom of speech would simply lead to more fascism and more war. Both sides made reference to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Predominantly Western nations argued that freedom of speech must be robustly protected in order to stop totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany from removing the civil liberties of their citizens. Notably, for example, after coming to power in 1933, Hitler immediately passed an “emergency decree” ordering that “restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press, on the right of assembly and the right of association…are permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.” REF Predominantly communist-led states argued that too much freedom of speech led to the rise of the Nazis in the first place.

Such diverging views persisted for the entire drafting period of the UDHR, as well as the other core international human rights treaties drafted in the years that followed. Hence, international law on the right to freedom of speech reflects a patchwork of influence comprised of two opposing views. We will now review the drafting of four major provisions in three different key texts, in order to better understand how the historic debates, resulting in an inherent contradiction, carry through to the present day.

UDHR, Article 19

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. REF

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a bold declaration of the right to freedom of speech—and does not contain any limitation clauses. However, this was not without controversy during the two-year UDHR drafting process. During the discussions in the Sub-Commission on the Freedom of Information, two clauses were proposed that would limit this right. Only two experts objected to both versions of the limitation clauses—the Soviet and Czechoslovakian delegates. However, this was not because the amendments restricted freedom of speech, but because they did not restrict it enough. Nevertheless, the majority of the Sub-Commission voted to delete the proposed limiting clauses altogether. REF

Undeterred, the Soviets continued their objections, and several more attempts to restrict freedom of speech and freedom of assembly were made. Thus, during the Third Committee of the Human Rights Commission in June 1948, the Soviet delegation proposed amendments that would put limits on both freedom of speech and freedom of association. It was submitted that the “use of freedom of speech and of the press for the purposes of propagating Fascism and aggression or of inciting war between nations shall not be tolerated.” REF Moreover, “All societies, unions and other organizations of a Fascist or anti-democratic nature, as well as their activity in any form, are forbidden by law under pain of punishment.” REF Again, however, all amendments intended to deny freedom of speech and assembly to those labelled as “fascists” were defeated. It was the view of the majority that despite “hating fascism as intensely as did the USSR,” REF tolerance should mean tolerating even the intolerant.

Much like the concerns over the term “hate speech” today, it was not clear to the delegates of many Western nations what was meant by the term “fascist,” particularly as the Soviet delegation had defined it as “the bloody dictatorship of the most reactionary section of capitalism and monopolies.” REF Thus, to the Soviets, “there was only a difference of degree and not one of kind between Nazi Germany and the Western democracies.” REF With such a vague definition of “fascist,” there was real danger that it could mean anything that the state chose it to mean, and its proscription could be used to restrict people or groups that were not state-approved.

Canada, along with other Western nations, made its opposition to the loose terminology clear, and the U.N. report notes,

The Canadian delegation could not accept the theory that human rights should be limited to those sanctioned and sanctified by the communist doctrine, while all others were to be outlawed as fascist. The term “fascism” which had once had a definite meaning…was now being blurred by the abuse of applying it to any person or idea which was not communist. REF

Before the final text was adopted, the Soviet delegation gave another insight into its position. A Soviet representative argued:

It was of no use to argue that ideas should only be opposed by other ideas; ideas had not stopped Hitler making war. Deeds were needed to prevent history from repeating itself. Not only must ideas be fought by other ideas but fascist manoeuvres and warmonger’s machinations must also and especially be made illegal and the necessary punitive measures must be provided for. REF

Therefore, in a document created to limit the reach of the state, the Soviets pushed for provisions that would extend state power, with “punitive measures” against ideas seen as “necessary.” However, the majority disagreed, and the final version of Article 19 did not explicitly exclude any particular people or group from protection. The Soviet notion that there were “dangerous ideas[,] the diffusion of which should be prevented” REF was rejected. Hence, at a time when fear of fascism was perhaps at its greatest—and indeed served as a primary motivation for the UDHR itself—the framers were not prepared to single out any speech as being unworthy of protection.

ICCPR, Article 19. With the drafting process beginning at roughly the same time as the UDHR but finishing nearly two decades later, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) is a binding treaty that has been ratified by most countries. ICCPR Article 19 protects the right to freedom of speech, the final version of which reads as follows:

1. Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference. 2. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice. 3. The exercise of the rights provided for in paragraph 2 of this article carries with it special duties and responsibilities. It may therefore be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary:      (a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others;      (b) For the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals. REF

Article 19(1) protects an absolute right to freedom of opinion. This was relatively uncontroversial and was adopted unanimously by the drafting committee in 1961. REF Similarly, Article 19(2), which protects freedom of speech in very similar terms to UDHR Article 19, “was adopted by 88 votes to none with just 1 abstention.” REF

However, unlike the UDHR, Article 19(3) introduces limitations on the right to freedom of speech. Hence, the right to hold opinions without interference is absolute; the right to express those opinions is qualified. And the limitation clause generated much debate over the course of more than one decade. Debate centered around various topics, including the reference to “special duties and responsibilities,” which does not appear in any other article in the treaty; the distinction between a right to “seek” and a right to “gather” information; and whether the limitation clause should be short and general in nature or list every limitation on speech imaginable (with a list 25 possible limitations generated by the drafting committee). REF

While a more general formulation was eventually voted through by 71–7 (with 12 abstentions), REF this was not without considerable opposition by the Soviet bloc, which by the 1960s “had become the champion of extensive restrictive language.” REF The 1961 summary of the debate is worth quoting in full, given that both sides of the argument are repeated almost verbatim today:

Those who held that additional specific restrictions should be included in article 19 laid stress on the continued existence of such evils as national, racial, and religious hatred or prejudices, war propaganda or the dissemination of slanderous rumours, and on the dangers these presented to peaceful and neighbourly relations among the nations in the era of nuclear weapons; States should therefore be able to prohibit such activities….

Those who opposed such specific restrictions as mentioned above feared that they might convert article 19 into a means of limiting freedom of information. While no one could quarrel with the objective of such restrictions, they held, it would be most difficult to determine, in general and in any specific case, what constituted e.g. war propaganda or incitement to national or racial hatred and what was legitimate information; there was also the question as to what authority would be empowered to decide such issues. There was a danger that Governments might allow only such information to appear as they favoured. Propoganda, prejudice and similar evils were best overcome by giving free play to all views, thus permitting truth to prevail. REF

These paragraphs represent a near-perfect summation of today’s debate over freedom of speech. One side of the debate argues that the state must be empowered to restrict evils such as “hate speech” in order to protect individuals, groups, and society at large from the harm that negative speech causes. The other side argues:

• It is impossible to draw the line between so-called “hate speech” and otherwise legitimate speech;
• It is highly questionable what authority would be empowered to decide such issues;
• It is possible—indeed, probable—that government actors would play favorites with speech; and
• The correct response to bad speech is always more speech, not less.

Following robust debate and some compromises, ICCPR Article 19 was ultimately adopted with almost universal support and only a handful of minor reservations. REF It largely matches UDHR Article 19, as well as the protections for freedom of speech in other international and regional human rights treaties. REF

However, the story does not end there, as the Soviet bloc was far more successful in pushing through ICCPR Article 20—a complete anomaly in the treaty as it imposes an obligation without a corresponding right—and Article 4 of the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). Both provisions obligate states to prohibit certain forms of speech, and both were highly controversial at the time they were drafted.

ICCPR, Article 20. Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights reads:

1. Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law. 2. Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.

Originally, the ICCPR included an article that stated, “Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hostility that constitutes an incitement to violence shall be prohibited by the law of the state.” REF However, this article was dropped during the Second Session of the Drafting Committee. REF

During the years that the Commission on Human Rights met, the issue continued to be discussed at length, with the Soviet bloc pushing for the prohibition of speech in addition to the limitations laid out in Article 19. The Polish representative argued that simply condemning incitement to violence did not go to “the root of the evil,” but “merely tackled its consequences, and…would only serve to hide the real nature of the problem.” REF Similarly, the representative from Yugoslavia submitted that while incitement to violence should be prohibited, “it was just as important to suppress manifestations of hatred which, even without leading to violence, constituted a degradation of human dignity and a violation of human rights.” REF

The predominantly Western nations fought against such a prohibition, and Eleanor Roosevelt of the United States argued that it “would be extremely dangerous to encourage Governments to issue prohibitions in that field, since any criticism of public or religious authorities might all too easily be described as incitement to hatred and consequently prohibited. Article [20] was not merely unnecessary, it was also harmful.” REF

As the debate summary text reveals, while there was “a general agreement that advocacy of national, racial, or religious hatred and war propaganda were evils, strong doubts were expressed as to whether these evils could be prohibited by the law of a state or by an international legal instrument.” REF Furthermore, it was feared that such a prohibition would “prejudice the right to freedom of opinion and expression,” as “a government could invoke the article to impose prior censorship on all forms of expression and to suppress the opinions of opposition groups and parties.” REF The General Assembly report of 1961 summarized the opposing views as follows:

The view was expressed that “incitement to violence” was a legally valid concept, while “incitement to discrimination” or “incitement to hostility” was not. On the other hand, it was argued that to prohibit only incitement to violence would not represent progress in international legislation. Often it was hostility or discrimination that led to violence. Any propaganda which might incite discrimination or hostility would likely incite violence and should therefore be prohibited. REF

The votes on Article 20 reflect “a see-saw of influence” REF which alternated between the predominantly communist support for a strong prohibition on speech, and the predominantly Western support for free speech. Over a period of seven years, “advocacy of hatred” provisions were added to the draft, deleted, added again, then deleted again—and ultimately added for good.

Hence, despite the opposition, Article 20 was incorporated into the ICCPR. As Jacob Mchangama observes, “The voting record reveals the startling fact that the internationalization of hate-speech prohibitions in human rights law owes its existence to a number of states where both criticisms of the prevalent totalitarian ideology as well as advocacy for democracy were strictly prohibited.” REF

ICERD, Article 4. A similar story can be told with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, a treaty that was adopted in 1965. ICERD Article 4 requires states to undertake “immediate and positive measures designed to eradicate all incitement to, or acts of…discrimination.” Despite the requirement to have “due regard” for the principles embodied in the UDHR—including freedom of speech—nations that accede to the treaty must nevertheless “declare an offence punishable by law all dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred, incitement to racial discrimination.” REF

Moreover, states must “declare illegal and prohibit organizations, and also organized and all other propaganda activities, which promote and incite racial discrimination and shall recognize participation in such organizations or activities as an offence punishable by [criminal REF ] law.” REF This is considered by supporters of international “hate speech” measures to be “the most important” provision REF and was undoubtedly “one of the most difficult and controversial of the Convention.” REF

During the drafting of the ICERD, it was clearly recognized that racism was a great moral evil. However, there was also concern about giving the state the power to use coercive criminal law to regulate the speech and private associations of its citizens. While the communist representative of Hungary declared that his country could not sign a convention that permitted fascist organizations to exist, the U.S. maintained that “citizens must still be allowed the right to be wrong.” REF

The dividing lines were as clear as ever: While the U.S. draft of Article 4 restricted its scope to speech “resulting in or likely to cause acts of violence,” REF the USSR/Poland draft made no such condition. REF As the debates continued, Czechoslovakia proposed an amendment to the U.S. draft that would delete the words “resulting in acts of violence”; Poland tabled an amendment that would further expand the power of the state to combat racist speech; and Ukraine sought to criminally punish citizens who paid subscriptions to fascist organizations. REF

All were unacceptable to the United Kingdom representative, Lady Gaitskell, who said that the amendments “infringed the fundamental right of freedom of speech.” REF Freedom of speech, she argued, is “the foundation-stone on which many of the other human rights were built; without freedom of speech, many cases of racial discrimination remained completely undiscovered.” REF While she maintained that the U.K. was taking steps to tackle the problem of racial discrimination, the right of all organizations, “even fascist and communist ones,” REF to exist and to make their views known must be defended, even though those organizations held views which the majority of the people utterly repudiated. The views of such organizations were tolerated, however, on one condition—that their speech “did not involve incitement to racial violence.” REF Moreover, the U.K.’s position was “based on the belief that in an advanced democracy the expression of such views was a risk which had to be taken.” REF

On the other hand, the communist nations of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia argued that freedom from discrimination should take precedence over the rights to freedom of speech and assembly. REF With reference to the position of the United Kingdom, the Czechoslovakian representative “felt that it was no proof of democracy that movements directed towards hatred and discrimination were allowed to exist. Her delegation was passionately dedicated to freedom of speech, but not when it was misused in the service of hatred, war and death.” REF

As with the ICCPR, the predominantly Western liberal democracies, joined by nations from Latin America, were unable to garner enough votes to limit the far-reaching scope of Article 4, and freedom of speech once again made way for state censorship. During the adoption of the ICERD in the General Assembly, it was the Colombian representative who most articulately challenged the impending threats to freedom of speech. He stated:

To penalize ideas, whatever their nature, is to pave the way for tyranny, for the abuse of power; and even in the most favourable circumstance it will merely lead to a sorry situation where interpretation is left to judges and law offices. As far as we are concerned, as far as our democracy is concerned, ideas are fought with ideas and reasons; theories are refuted with arguments and not by resort to the scaffold, prison, exile, confiscation or fines. REF

The warning of the Colombian representative is no less important today. ICERD Article 4, together with ICCPR Article 20(2), empower the state to use coercive means to eradicate speech that is deemed by the state to be hateful. As Mchangama notes, “The idea that deliberate state action—even at the expense of individual liberty—is the principal vehicle for social change and human progress is a hallmark of socialism, fascism, communism, and in some cases, forms of progressivism.” REF

As ICERD Article 4 and ICCPR Article 20(2) were passed, states that ratified the treaties were required to take positive measures to introduce “hate speech” laws. And although some nations placed reservations against these provisions at the time of ratification, they neglected to follow their own reservations in the years that followed.

Despite the principled defense of free speech that was given on behalf of many nations during the drafting process of the international documents, “hate speech” laws gradually spread throughout the liberal democratic nations that had once opposed them.

From the 1970s onwards, the international measures passed at the U.N. were incorporated at the national level. For example, one of Italy’s “hate speech” laws explains that the provision was adopted “for the purposes of implementing Article 4 of the Convention,” REF and one of Belgium’s “hate speech” laws notes that “[t]his Act fulfils the Belgian obligations under the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination of 21 December 1965.” REF Similarly, Article 266(b) of the Danish Criminal Code—at the heart of the Danish cartoons controversy several years ago—reads, “This provision was inserted in the Criminal Code in 1971 in connection with Denmark’s ratification of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, to ensure full compliance with Article 4 of that convention.” REF And Cyprus’s relatively recent “hate speech law” states in the preamble: “For the purpose of harmonization with the act of the European Union entitled ‘Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA of 28 November 2008 on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law.’” REF

Despite the principled defense of free speech that was given on behalf of many nations during the drafting process of the international documents, “hate speech” laws gradually spread throughout the liberal democratic nations that had once opposed them. Having incorporated the international provisions into national legislation, most nations have since taken the opportunity to expand the reach of the “hate speech” laws—and the power of the state.

III. Free Speech Versus Censorship in Current U.N. Interpretation

Various U.N. bodies are tasked with interpreting international human rights law. Each year, various parts of the U.N. machinery churn out countless reports, resolutions, and recommendations. These include thematic reports by special rapporteurs on multiple issues, country reports by bodies tasked with monitoring states’ compliance with treaties, reports by the Human Rights Council and General Assembly, reports by the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and many, many more.

It is therefore often inaccurate to state that “the U.N. says so” regarding any given topic, given that the U.N. comprises many different parts, which on occasion say different things. This is certainly true for freedom of speech, as the inherent free speech contradiction within foundational U.N. treaties has reverberated throughout the U.N. system, leading to contradictory statements in the decades that followed.

The following is not an exhaustive collection of everything the various U.N. bodies have said about the freedom of speech, but it provides a sample of how the fundamental right is being interpreted by various U.N. bodies.

Support for Freedom of Speech. Many U.N. documents convey broad support for freedom of speech. For example, the U.N. Human Rights Committee is tasked with monitoring member states’ implementation of the ICCPR, as well as providing its interpretation of provisions within the treaty. REF In its major interpretation of ICCPR Article 19, known as General Comment No. 34, the Committee interprets the right to freedom of speech broadly, stating:

Freedom of opinion and freedom of expression are indispensable conditions for the full development of the person. They are essential for any society. They constitute the foundation stone for every free and democratic society. The two freedoms are closely related, with freedom of expression providing the vehicle for the exchange and development of opinions. REF

Moreover, restrictions on freedom of speech must pass a three-part test in order to be valid: “the restrictions must be ‘provided by law’; they may only be imposed for one of the grounds set out in subparagraphs (a) and (b) of paragraph 3 [Article 19]; and they must conform to the strict tests of necessity and proportionality.” REF The Committee goes on to note that “[r]estrictions must not be overbroad” REF and that

[w]hen a State party invokes a legitimate ground for restriction of freedom of expression, it must demonstrate in specific and individualized fashion the precise nature of the threat, and the necessity and proportionality of the specific action taken, in particular by establishing a direct and immediate connection between the expression and the threat. REF

The U.N. also has a number of independent experts dedicated to different issues, known as special rapporteurs. Similar to the U.N. Human Rights Committee, these rapporteurs have been generally supportive of freedom of speech. For example, in 2006 several rapporteurs issued a joint report with their interpretation of the ICCPR. They stated:

Article 20 of the Covenant was drafted against the historical background of the horrors committed by the Nazi regime during the Second World War. The threshold of the acts that are referred to in article 20 is relatively high because they have to constitute advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred. Accordingly, the Special Rapporteur is of the opinion that expressions should only be prohibited under article 20 if they constitute incitement to imminent acts of violence or discrimination against a specific individual or group. REF

Although the rapporteurs repeat the vague terminology of ICCPR Article 20(2), their emphasis is clearly towards freedom of speech. The threshold of acts referred to in Article 20(2) must be high because, according to the rapporteurs, the context for this provision was nothing less than the horrors of the Nazi regime.

Similarly, the Rabat Plan of Action, released by the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2012, states:

Article 20 of the Covenant requires a high threshold because, as a matter of fundamental principle, limitation of speech must remain an exception. Such threshold must take into account the provisions of article 19 of the Covenant.… This implies, among other things, that restrictions are clearly and narrowly defined and respond to a pressing social need; are the least intrusive measure available; are not overly broad, so that they do not restrict speech in a wide or untargeted way; and are proportionate so that the benefit to the protected interest outweighs the harm to freedom of expression, including with respect to the sanctions they authorize. REF

In the same year, the special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression published an extensive report on the right to freedom of opinion and expression, in which he stated,

The threshold of the types of expression that would fall under the provisions of article 20 (2) should be high and solid.… Moreover, while States are required to prohibit by law any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence under article 20 (2) of the Covenant, there is no requirement to criminalize such expression. The Special Rapporteur underscores that only serious and extreme instances of incitement to hatred…should be criminalized. REF

Similarly, in a special report focused on tackling religious hatred, the special rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief stated, “[T]he guarantees of freedom of expression as enshrined in article 19 of the Covenant can never be circumvented by invoking article 20. Prohibitions must be precisely defined and must be enacted without any discriminatory intention or effect.” REF

Moreover, all these U.N. bodies call out blasphemy laws as being incompatible with international human rights law. For example, the U.N. Human Rights Committee has stated: “Prohibitions of displays of lack of respect for a religion or other belief system, including blasphemy laws, are incompatible with the Covenant, except in the specific circumstances envisaged in article 20, paragraph 2, of the Covenant. Such prohibitions must also comply with the strict requirements of article 19, paragraph 3.”

The Rabat Plan of Action states: “States that have blasphemy laws should repeal them, as such laws have a stifling impact on the enjoyment of freedom of religion or belief, and healthy dialogue and debate about religion.” REF The U.N. Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief has concluded that “States that still have blasphemy laws should repeal them, as such laws may fuel intolerance, stigmatization, discrimination and incitement to violence and discourage intergroup communication.” REF And the former special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression “urges States to repeal [blasphemy laws] and to replace them with laws protecting individuals’ right to freedom of religion or belief in accordance with international human rights standards.” REF

Similarly, the current special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression has recommended that states “[r]eview and, where necessary, revise national laws,” because “[n]ational legislation increasingly adopts overly broad definitions of key terms, such as…hate speech, that fail to limit the discretion of executive authorities.” REF In the same report, the special rapporteur notes, “In an exchange with the Government of Pakistan, I raised concerns that recent legislation aims to limit ‘extremism’ and ‘hate speech’ without specifically defining either term…. European human rights law also fails to define hate speech adequately.” REF

However, despite clear problems with censoring speech under a banner that has not and cannot be adequately defined, this is the clear direction that parts of the U.N. have pursued.

Support for Censorship. Given the inconsistent and often contradictory nature of international law and its interpretation by various U.N. bodies, it is of little surprise that, over time, countries with abysmal free speech records have felt empowered to use the U.N. machinery to advance a censorious agenda. For example, for more than 15 years, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) advanced through the United Nations system the idea that “defamation of religions” should be illegal. This manifested in a draft resolution introduced by Pakistan in the Commission on Human Rights in 1999. This draft was initially titled “defamation of Islam” REF but was broadened to “defamation of religions.” REF The Commission adopted the resolution (Resolution 1999/82) without a vote. REF

Discussions surrounding the resolution nevertheless focused on the defamation of Islam, and the resolution, as approved by the Commission on Human Rights, highlights Islam in particular as being “frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and with terrorism.” REF It also “expresses concern” at the “incite[ment of] acts of violence, xenophobia or related intolerance and discrimination towards Islam and any other religion.” REF Resolution 1999/82 also:

[u]rges all States, within their national legal framework, in conformity with international human rights instruments to take all appropriate measures to combat hatred, discrimination, intolerance and acts of violence, intimidation and coercion motivated by religious intolerance, including attacks on religious places, and to encourage understanding, tolerance and respect in matters relating to freedom of religion or belief. REF

The Human Rights Council approved similar resolutions on defamation of religions through 2010. The General Assembly passed a resolution on defamation of religions from 2005 to 2010. The first defamation of religions resolution in 1999 only included “defamation” in the title; by 2009 the resolution mentioned “defamation” twelve times. REF

However, with each passing year, support for the resolution dwindled in both the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly. Accordingly, in March 2011, the OIC, through Pakistan, introduced a new resolution to the Human Rights Council. REF Adopted without a vote, Resolution 16/18, “Combating Intolerance, Negative Stereotyping and Stigmatization of, and Discrimination, Incitement to Violence and Violence Against, Persons Based on Religion or Belief.” The Human Rights Council and General Assembly has adopted similar resolutions ever since.

Resolution 16/18 has been called a positive improvement on the language of the resolutions on defamation of religions because it focuses on the promotion of the rights to freedom of religion and freedom of speech and emphasizes preventing harm done to people rather than to ideas or beliefs. After its passage, then – United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lauded the resolution for “reject[ing] the broad prohibitions on speech called for in the former ‘defamation of religions’ resolution, and support[ing] approaches that do not limit freedom of expression or infringe on the freedom of religion.” REF

However, others have argued that the shift to Resolution 16/18 from the defamation of religions resolutions has a “grim [reality]: the revised approach represented in Resolution 16/18 is no more than a diplomatic veneer of global consensus on the thorny subject of freedom of expression and defamation of Islam.” REF Indeed, it is important to note that the Organization of Islamic Cooperation spearheaded the passage of Resolution 16/18, as it had the defamation of religions resolutions.

In a statement before the Human Rights Council adopted Resolution 16/18, Zamir Akram, Ambassador from Pakistan, said, “I want to state categorically that this resolution does not replace the OIC’s earlier resolutions on combatting defamation of religions which were adopted by the Human Rights Council and continue to remain valid.” REF Therefore, from the perspective of the OIC, Resolution 16/18 and its subsequent resolutions do not signal a move away from the defamation of religions movement. Instead, the newer language is merely a pragmatic way to increase support for its cause.

This is particularly concerning given that Resolution 16/18 challenges the fundamental freedoms guaranteed by international human rights treaties. Its ambiguous language allows for states—including those with blasphemy laws—to continue to determine what conduct or speech is permissible, rather than outlining clear criteria that apply in all states. And because Resolution 16/18 is vaguely worded, the risk is that states can use it to justify their already existing blasphemy laws, and those states without such laws may feel justified in instituting new rules.

However, it is not just a collection of member states that are pushing an increasingly censorious approach. Other parts of the U.N. apparatus do so, too. For example, in 2009 a number of special rapporteurs criticized the defamation of religion movement, but seemed pleased that it had morphed into a debate on censoring “hate speech,” stating:

Whereas the debate concerning the dissemination of expressions which may offend certain believers has throughout the last ten years evolved around the notion of “defamation of religions,” we welcome the fact that the debate seems to be shifting to the concept of “incitement to racial or religious hatred,” sometimes also referred to as “hate speech.” REF

The idea that blasphemy or its international equivalent, defamation of religion, is unacceptable but the alternative framework of prohibiting “hate speech” is compatible with freedom of speech is shared by other U.N. bodies. For example, in its report on Greece, the Committee on the Eradication of Racial Discrimination, tasked with monitoring member state compliance with the ICERD treaty, stated:

The Committee is concerned about the continuing existence of legal provisions concerning blasphemy and the risk that they may be used in a discriminatory manner that is prohibited under the provisions of the Convention (art. 5 (d) (vii)).

The Committee recommends that the State party abolish articles 198 and 199 on blasphemy from its Criminal Code. REF

However, in the preceding paragraph of the very same report, the committee urged Greece to “effectively prevent, combat and punish racist hate speech,” stating:

[T]he fundamental right of freedom of expression should not undermine the principles of dignity, tolerance, equality and non-discrimination as the exercise of the right to freedom of expression carries with it special responsibilities, among which is the obligation not to disseminate ideas on racial superiority or hatred.

Similarly, the U.N. Human Rights Committee habitually calls on member states to prohibit “hate speech,” including criminal prohibition. For example, in 2016, it noted in regard to Slovakia that “hate speech legislation does not cover sexual orientation and gender identity” and recommended the country “adopt measures to tackle hate speech on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity.” REF In 2018, it told Norway to take “effective measures to prevent hate speech” and “systematize the regular collection of data on these crimes, including the number of reported cases, investigations launched, prosecutions and convictions.” REF

Moreover, it noted Norway should “strengthen the investigation capacity of law enforcement officials on hate crimes and criminal hate speech, including on the Internet, and ensure all cases are systematically investigated, that perpetrators are prosecuted and punished and that appropriate compensation is awarded to the victims.” REF And, in 2019, it called on the Netherlands to “[i]ntensify its efforts to prevent hate speech, particularly by politicians and high-level public officials.” REF

Having briefly surveyed the U.N.’s various interpretations of the key treaty law, we can therefore conclude the following:

• U.N. bodies appear broadly supportive of freedom of speech and regularly voice opposition to blasphemy laws—whether these laws appear at the national level or through their international equivalent of defamation of religions;
• The very same U.N. bodies are broadly supportive of “hate speech” laws and increasingly call for greater censorship of “hate speech”; and
• Rather than continuing to fight for international blasphemy laws, supporters of blasphemy prohibitions such as Pakistan and the 57-member state body, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, have broadly accepted the alternative vague terminology promoted by Western nations, knowing that this language will suffice for their purposes.

This all reached a head in 2019, with the U.N.’s new Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech—supported by almost all member states.

A Decisive Move Toward Censorship? In May 2019, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres released a synopsis of the U.N.’s new Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech that has the potential to influence every part of the United Nations, from the Secretariat to the General Assembly to the agencies. REF

In a speech at U.N. Headquarters in New York, Guterres called “hate speech” “an attack on tolerance, inclusion, diversity and the very essence of our human rights norms and principles,” and said “it undermines social cohesion, erodes shared values, and can lay the foundation for violence, setting back the cause of peace, stability, sustainable development and the fulfillment of human rights for all.” REF While he recognized that international law does not prohibit “hate speech” but instead prohibits incitement to discrimination, hostility, and violence, he tied “hate speech” to genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Cambodia, and to recent violence in Sri Lanka, New Zealand, and the United States. His message is clear: “Hate speech” must be stopped at all costs.

The two stated goals of the U.N. Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech are to “[e]nhance U.N. efforts to address root causes and drivers of hate speech” and to “[e]nable effective U.N. responses to the impact of hate speech on societies.” Guterres and the synopsis document claim that addressing hate speech does not mean suppressing freedom of speech, and that the strategy will not infringe on that right. Yet given the broad terms laid out in the synopsis, this is almost certainly a misguided promise at best—and a deliberately misleading promise at worst.

The launch campaign for the Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech was enthusiastically supported by Western nations keen to criminalize “hate speech,” Islamic nations keen to criminalize blasphemy, and authoritarian nations keen to criminalize anyone who poses a threat to state power. The U.N.’s new definition of “hate speech” applies to “any kind of communication,” including “behaviour,” which could include any number of actions, even involuntary ones. Under this definition there is a very low threshold for speech to be considered “hate speech.”

The synopsis acknowledges that the definition of “hate speech” goes beyond ICCPR article 20(2), but states that “hate speech” as defined in the document “may to [sic] be harmful.” While the synopsis currently focuses on what the U.N. can do to address and combat “hate speech” and does not in its current form explicitly call for the criminalization of “hate speech,” calls for prohibition will likely follow, not least because other parts of the U.N. machinery use the term “hate speech” in a different way and do call for the prohibition of criminal “hate speech.”

Only time will tell how the U.N. will proceed with this campaign, but its introduction marks what could be a decisive step towards censorship.

IV. Freedom of Speech and Our Future Direction

What, then, does the future hold in the battle for freedom of speech? There are four immediate actions that can be taken to defend and uphold freedom of speech.

Reform International Law. First, international law should be reformed to better protect freedom of speech. As detailed above, the vague wording of ICCPR Article 20 and ICERD Article 4 has resulted in the global spread of “hate speech” laws—as well as providing cover for blasphemy laws and other severe speech restrictions. As Amal Clooney and Philippa Webb have persuasively argued, “CERD Article 4 should be deleted by the agreement of States Parties or excluded through reservations.” REF Similarly, Clooney and Webb argue, “States should enter reservations to ICCPR Article 20 to prohibit speech only where it intentionally incites violence or a criminal offence that is likely to follow imminently (or is otherwise concretely identified) as a result of the speech.” REF

If international law cannot currently be reformed—and there is certainly a lack of political will at this moment in time—states should add reservations to these articles and follow their reservations at the national level. The reservations of the U.S. could be emulated by other nations. They state:

[ICCPR] article 20 does not authorise or require legislature or other action by the United States that would restrict the right of free speech and association protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States.

[T]he Constitution and laws of the United States contain extensive protections of individual freedom of speech, expression and association. Accordingly, the United States does not accept any obligation under this Convention, in particular under [ICERD] articles 4 and 7, to restrict those rights, through the adoption of legislation or any other measures, to the extent that they are protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States.

Repeal National “Hate Speech” Laws and Blasphemy Laws. Second, even if the governing treaty law remains exactly the same, the speech restrictions of many nations go well beyond the permissible limits of these provisions. Hence, national laws should be repealed in line with the fundamental right to freedom of speech. As the special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression recommended in 2016, U.N. member states should “[r]eview and, where necessary, revise national laws. National legislation increasingly adopts overly broad definitions of key terms, such as terrorism, national security, extremism and hate speech, that fail to limit the discretion of executive authorities.” REF Similarly, as the Rabat Plan of Action states: “States that have blasphemy laws should repeal them, as such laws have a stifling impact on the enjoyment of freedom of religion or belief, and healthy dialogue and debate about religion.” REF

Repealing excessive speech restrictions is not unthinkable or even unlikely. For example, in the United Kingdom a diverse array of campaign groups, civil liberty organizations, and politicians successfully called for the word “insulting” to be removed from section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. Section 5 made it a criminal offence to use “threatening, abusive or insulting words…within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress.” The campaign was overwhelmingly successful, and the law was changed in 2013. REF In the same year, section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act was repealed. The section had prohibited “the communication of hate messages by telephone or on the Internet” and made it unlawful to “expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.” Referred to as “a good, albeit belated, first step at reform,” REF the law was seen to cause a greater threat to liberty than the harm it was meant to address. REF

As Clooney and Webb state, “In order to recognize a higher measure of protection for speech than what is necessarily provided for under international human rights law, national parliaments may need to enact and amend domestic legislation, or even domestic constitutions or bills of rights.” REF This can and should be done immediately.

Rescind the U.N.’s Current Plan on “Hate Speech.” Third, the U.S. and other nations that protect and promote freedom of speech should urge Secretary-General Guterres to rescind the U.N. Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech in the interest of protecting freedom of speech. If the Secretary-General fails to rescind the Plan of Action, member states should urge the Secretary-General to significantly amend the Plan of Action to make it compatible with the fundamental right to freedom of speech. If the Secretary-General fails to either rescind the Plan of Action or make significant amendments to it, the U.S. and other nations that protect and promote freedom of speech should officially disassociate from Plan of Action.

Promote a Robust Free Speech Standard. Fourth, restrictions on “hate speech” should only be valid when the speech constitutes incitement to imminent violence or other criminal offences. A higher free speech threshold will allow citizens to effectively regulate their conduct, as well as allowing the law to be applied without its current arbitrariness.

This is the standard adopted by the U.S. Supreme Court, REF which has taken a markedly different position than every other nation in the world—upholding freedom of speech through the First Amendment to a far greater degree than all 192 other U.N. Member States. Under this standard, speech can be punished—if likely to incite imminent lawless action—but not for simply causing offence.

As we have seen, this was the free speech standard that would have been adopted under international law had the Soviet Union and other Communist nations not prevented it. If such a free speech standard is to be adopted in other nations today, U.S. leadership is greatly needed.

The U.N. has a confusing approach to the meaning of the freedom of speech. The UDHR Article 19, ICCPR Article 19, and various interpretations by the U.N. Human Rights Committee and Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression provide robust free speech protections. However, due to the complex history of the U.N., particularly the East/West positions throughout the drafting process of foundational human rights treaties, there has always been a pro-censorship strand running through the U.N. system.

If the pro-free speech “side” is to take precedence, positive U.S. action is needed. Free speech must be modelled and embraced at the national level and championed at the international level—starting with the Secretary General’s ill-advised Plan of Action on Hate Speech. To persuade a skeptical world, the idea of free speech must be convincingly argued in principle and demonstrated in practice.

Almost a century ago, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes stated:

Those who won our independence…knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies, and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones. REF

In other words, the remedy for any form of speech to be wayward is the right of others to demonstrate the error of the first speaker through logic, facts, and reason. The answer is always more speech. And as a Colombian delegate reminded the U.N. General Assembly over 50 years ago, “[I]deas are fought with ideas and reasons; theories are refuted with arguments.” REF Today, the idea of freedom of speech itself must be fought for.

Michael P. Farris is President and CEO of Alliance Defending Freedom. Paul B. Coleman is Executive Director of Alliance Defending Freedom International. This paper is one in a series of essays on the natural law and natural rights foundations of internationally recognized human rights. The “First Principles of International Human Rights” essays propose reforms of the human rights movement for the increased protection of the fundamental and inalienable rights of all people.

President and CEO of Alliance Defending Freedom

Executive Director, Alliance Defending Freedom International

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Freedom of Expression, a Fundamental Human Right

About the author, ban ki-moon.

Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right, enshrined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But around the world, there are governments and those wielding power who find many ways to obstruct it.

They impose high taxes on newsprint, making newspapers so expensive that people can't afford to buy them. Independent radio and TV stations are forced off the air if they criticize Government policy. The censors are also active in cyberspace, restricting the use of the Internet and new media.

Some journalists risk intimidation, detention and even their lives, simply for exercising their right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas, through any media, and regardless of frontiers.

Last year, UNESCO condemned the killing of 77 journalists. These were not high-profile war correspondents, killed in the heat of battle. Most of them worked for small, local publications in peacetime. They were killed for attempting to expose wrongdoing or corruption.

I condemn these murders and insist that the perpetrators are brought to justice. All Governments have a duty to protect those who work in the media. This protection must include investigating and prosecuting those who commit crimes against journalists.

Impunity gives the green light to criminals and murderers, and empowers those who have something to hide. Over the long term, it has a corrosive and corrupting effect on society as a whole.

This year's theme is Freedom of Information: the right to know. I welcome the global trend towards new laws which recognize the universal right to publicly held information. Unfortunately, these new laws do not always translate into action. Requests for official information are often refused, or delayed, sometimes for years. At times, poor information management is to blame. But all too often, this happens because of a culture of secrecy and a lack of accountability.

We must work to change attitudes and to raise awareness. People have a right to information that affects their lives, and states have a duty to provide this information. Such transparency is essential to good government.

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Speech by Prime Minister Rutte at presentation International Four Freedoms Award

Speech | 11-04-2024

Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands held this speech in Middelburg at the presentation of the International Four Freedoms Award to Save Ukraine.

Ladies and gentlemen,

One of the best-known people in Dutch history is Anne Frank. Just an ordinary Jewish girl. No doubt you’re familiar with her.

Or rather: you’re familiar with her diary, in which she described her life in hiding with her family during the Second World War. Many millions of copies have been sold worldwide. And the reason is that Anne’s story is not simply about the horrors of war. Above all, it’s a story of hope. It’s about seeing light in the darkness. Or, as Anne herself put it: “Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.”

Those words have lost none of their wisdom in the years since they were written. Because today, in our time, there is still darkness in many places around the world. The reason I’m here today, is to shine a light on 1 of the places it is needed most: Ukraine.

Since Russia’s brutal invasion, over 2 years ago now, thousands of Ukrainian children have been abducted and taken to Russia, or to areas occupied by Russia. Thousands of children, ripped away not only from their parents, but from everything that made them who they are. Their language. Their country. Their identity.

With their abduction, their identities have been erased. Or made invisible. After all, the victims are still alive. Physically, at least.

It’s 1 of the worst war crimes we can imagine. Targeting the most vulnerable people: children and their parents. And in this dark reality, Save Ukraine is a candle defying the darkness.

In 2014, when Russia began its aggression against Ukraine, Mykola Kuleba decided that he would not stand idly by. He would not just wait and see what happened. He would do all he could, to fight back. He would give everything he had. With anyone who would join him.

And as so often happens with people who stand up to evil, he was soon joined by others willing to help. To bring kidnapped children back home. To evacuate vulnerable people from the most dangerous areas.

And so, that one flickering candle grew into what it is now: A blazing beacon of hope for Ukrainian parents. A rescuer of vulnerable people on the frontlines of the war.

Already, over 100,000 vulnerable people have been evacuated from combat zones. Thanks to Save Ukraine, 282 children have been safely returned to their homeland. And together with their parents, they can find respite in 1 of the organisation’s 7 Hope and Healing Centers. There, they can heal from their psychological wounds. Or at least, they can start to heal.

But we can all draw hope from these acts of resistance, big and small

Of course, more needs to be done. Unfortunately, the end of this terrible war is not yet in sight. But we can all draw hope from these acts of resistance, big and small. Every child saved, is living proof of Putin’s war crimes. And he knows that.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “Where do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home.” Save Ukraine demonstrates the truth of those words. By taking a stand when human rights are violated. By turning despair into hope. But above all, by showing in practice that everyone can be human rights defenders. Everyone. Even when peace and justice seem a long way away. Especially then.

Mykola and James: the importance of defending human rights is a strong thread running through your lives and your families. So let me now ask you both to come to the stage, so that James can present Mykola with the International Four Freedoms Award for Save Ukraine.

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Ted Hesson is an immigration reporter for Reuters, based in Washington, D.C. His work focuses on the policy and politics of immigration, asylum and border security. Prior to joining Reuters in 2019, Ted worked for the news outlet POLITICO, where he also covered immigration. His articles have appeared in POLITICO Magazine, The Atlantic and VICE News, among other publications. Ted holds a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and bachelor's degree from Boston College.

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US ex-diplomat sentenced to 15 years for spying for Cuba over decades

A former U.S. diplomat was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Friday after admitting to acting as an agent of Cuba in what the Justice Department has called one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the U.S. government.