From the time of their origin in natural rights, there has been a troubling question at the heart of human rights: the question – who are human rights really for?

Hugo Grotius’s On the Law of War and Peace (1625) sought to elucidate general rules for the protections for non-combatants in the chaos of the Thirty Years War, thereby generalising a theme that the Irish monk, Adomnán, had addressed in his Law of the Innocents nearly a millennium earlier.

Later in the seventeenth century, John Locke articulated his theory of natural rights in response to the civil wars in Great Britain and Ireland, which had killed 5% of the population of Great Britain and somewhere between 15% and 40% of the population of Ireland. The theory of natural rights that John Locke set out in his Second Treatise of Government (1681), was built around the idea of property, which Locke described in chapter 15, paragraph 173, as “that property which men have in their persons as well as their goods”. This conception of rights as property meant that Locke’s theory tended, in practice, to amount to human rights for rich, white men. Locke’s Second Treatise of Government was published in 1689 and became the unofficial political philosophy undergirding the Parliamentary sovereignty of the oligarchic British and (until 1800, Irish) Parliaments, in which only propertied men were able to vote in the elections for the House of Commons and the historic land-owning class sat in the House of Lords as of right.

Locke’s theories of property and liberty also underwrote American political life. Locke himself drafted the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), which established “the Interest of the Lords Proprietors with Equality”, and which specified, on the instructions of those paying Locke for his work, in clause 110 that “Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his Negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.” Thus, whatever his personal views about slavery, Locke had a direct hand in the denial of liberty, equality, and fraternity to those Africans transported to the United States and to their descendants.

This meant that the Founding Fathers of America could solemnly declare that they held it to be a self-evident truth that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” including “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, whilst no less than 41 of the 56 signatories to the Declaration of Independence of July, 4, 1776 were slave owners.

The atrocities committed by fascist and communist regimes in the Second World War led to the revival of the idea of human rights. The framers of the international human rights instruments in the aftermath of World War Two were focussed, as Grotius and Adomnán, on those who had been victims of wartime atrocities and on discriminatory and exterminatory policies justified by raisons d’État. The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights 1947 affirmed “the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” and “the dignity and worth of the human person” and “the equal rights of men and women”. Its provisions were intended to provide protection to those victimised because of their race, sex, caste, class or other status (Article 2). All were to enjoy “the right to life, liberty and security of person” (Article 3) and to be protected from slavery (Article 4), torture and degrading treatment or punishment (Article 5).

Looking back on nearly eighty years since the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and on the declarations and conventions which followed it, although those instruments have provided some level of protection for the vulnerable, marginalised, and despised, the question: who are human rights really for?, remains an uncomfortable one.

The Oxford legal philosopher, H.L.A. Hart, wrote the article, ‘Are there any natural rights?’ in 1955. His answer showed just how deeply embedded Locke’s association of rights with property had become at both popular and academic levels: “Rights are typically conceived of as possessed or owned by or belonging to individuals … forming a kind of moral property of individuals to which they are as individuals entitled”.

Thought of in this way, rights-claims are property claims, claims made by individuals to increase the areas of their autonomy and freedom to choose. Rights-claims are made successfully by the powerful, the wealthy, the well-educated, the well-informed, and the well-connected, whilst the vulnerable and despised are unable to vindicate their rights.

The problem is compounded by the way in which rights-claims work in practice. Civil rights are contained in legally binding Conventions and domestic legislation, and the conception of rights as property has been used to develop from these civil rights autonomy rights, with the right to die being the latest right claimed. Social and economic rights, however, are aspirational, subject to political negotiation rather than judicial enforcement. As a consequence, those without access to the levers of power are left to watch as their social and economic needs are left unmet whilst resources are diverted in favour of the autonomy rights of those who know how to make effective threats of litigation.

This reality provides a breeding ground in which civil rights themselves come under attack. Those who cannot see that human rights have made any difference to their circumstances become vulnerable to propaganda that it is prisoners, illegal immigrants, and other undesirables who have been the main winners from human rights. The issues raised here will be explored in a future blog post looking at Professor Julian Rivers’ article, “Bringing Rights Home Again: the UK and the ECHR”.

We’ve looked in other posts in this series at the ways in which human rights can be re-thought, namely “The Problem of Human Rights.” Christians need to be at the forefront of such re-imagining, if human rights are to be what they ought to be: a way of ensuring that the needs of the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, and other isolated, vulnerable, and despised persons are provided for and that each person living in our societies is treated with dignity and respect.