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The concept of human rights is to a considerable extent, though not wholly, legal. Although the concept is arguably ancient (see chapter two), it first appeared on the international agenda when the United Nations Charter declared in 1945 that the UN was determined ‘to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women, and of nations large and small’. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948. This declaration has had an enormous influence on international human-rights law and on the laws of many states with various political, economic and cultural characters. It was adopted in the aftermath of the victorious Allied war against Fascism, and in a spirit of idealism. The declaration was proclaimed to be ‘a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations’. All human beings, Article 1 affirms, ‘are born free and equal in dignity and rights’. Everyone, Article 2 states, ‘is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration without discrimination of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status’.

There is obviously a wide gap between the promises of the UDHR and the real world of human-rights violations. In so far as we sympathize with the victims, we may criticize the UN and its member states for failing to keep their promises. However, we cannot understand the gap between human-rights ideals and the real world of human-rights violations by sympathy or by legal analysis. This requires investigation by the various social sciences of the causes of political oppression. The UN introduced the concept of human rights into international law and politics. The field of international politics is, however, dominated by states and other powerful actors (such as multinational corporations) that have priorities other than human rights. It is a leading feature of the human-rights field that the governments of the world proclaim human rights but have a highly variable record when it comes to implementing them. We must understand why this is so.

The concept of human rights raises further difficulties because it stretches well beyond cases of extreme cruelty and injustice. Article 1 of the UDHR, for example, states that all human beings are equal in rights. Article 18 says that everyone has the right to freedom of religion. How should we define the right to freedom of religion of those whose religion denies that all human beings are equal in rights? How can we make sense of human rights if the implementation of some human rights requires the violation of others? Here the problem of implementing human-rights ideals derives, not from lack of political will or conflicts of political interests, but from the fact that human rights may not be ‘compossible’, that is, the implementation of one human right may require the violation of another, or the protection of a human right of one person may require the violation of the same human right of another. If a religious group, for example, forbids its members, on the basis of its religious beliefs, to change their religion, then the religious freedom of the group will conflict with that of any members who wish to change their religion. If we support human rights that are not compossible, our thinking must surely be confused.

The problem of compossibility has been aggravated by what has been called ‘rights inflation’, that is, the extension of the concept of human rights to an ill-defined number of causes. There are controversial human rights even in the UDHR, such as the right to ‘periodic holidays with pay’, which some say is not ‘universal’ but limited to certain industrial societies. Courts may decide rather precisely the legal rights of those who appear before them. Human rights are rather vaguely worded, and their meaning is not always settled in courts of law. The determination of the meaning of human rights is a continuing social process that involves not only legal professionals (such as judges, UN experts and academic lawyers) but also various ‘stakeholders’ (such as governments, inter-governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), non-legal academics and citizens). If the concept of human rights is to be useful, we must distinguish human rights from the legal rights of particular societies, and from other desirable social objectives.

What are ‘rights’, and how do ‘human rights’ differ from other kinds of rights? The concept of ‘rights’ is closely connected to that of ‘right’. Something is ‘right’ if it conforms with a standard of rightness. All societies have such standards, but it is often said that many cultures have no conception of people ‘having rights’. The idea of everyone having ‘human rights’ is said to be especially alien to most cultures.

The idea that we ‘have rights’ is confusing because it implies that rights are ‘things’ that we could have as we have arms and legs. Rights are, however, not mysterious things, but justified claims or entitlements that derive from moral and/or legal rules. These moral and legal rules can be found in numerous treaties and laws, as well as in values shared by many, though not by all. The existence of human rights is grounded in the belief that human beings ought to be treated with a certain kind of respect. The problem of ‘believing in’ human rights is not whether or not they ‘exist’, but whether there are sufficiently good reasons for supporting them and seeking to implement them. This requires a justificatory philosophical theory of human rights (see chapter four).