Categorising responsibilities and duties

Abstract

The originality of this book is to ground a critical legal defence of human rights within the reciprocal responsibilities and duties arising from the exercise of rights. This chapter provides the book’s opportunity to analyse these responsibilities and duties. First, some rights’ theorists, such as Thomas Hobbes, Samuel Pufendorf and John Locke, believed that individuals had possessed natural rights, such as life and liberty, in the state of nature. Did others in the state of nature have reciprocal responsibilities to secure these natural rights? Maybe not, at least in a formal sense, since prima facie natural rights were absolute; they were unfettered. But the breach of individuals’ natural rights by others, in the state of nature, was circumscribed by natural law. Either way, because of the insecurity of the state of nature to protect natural rights, it was necessary for people to absent themselves from the natural state. The aim was to institute a political community, with a sovereign, whose duty was to protect these rights (if they endured after political sovereignty), as part of a social contract. Later theorists, such as Jeremy Bentham and John Austin, rejected the idea of natural rights, partly on the basis that a reciprocal – legal – duty to respect them was lacking. Over time, natural rights evolved into a broader number of human rights, comprising: civil and political rights, of which natural rights were the foundation; economic, social and cultural rights; and group rights, such as those of women, persons of colour, peoples etc. The significance of human rights became much more acute after the atrocities committed by Germany, Japan etc during World War II (WWII), culminating in the creation of the United Nations, in 1945. Human rights instruments arising after the creation of the United Nations, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966), proclaimed an extensive list of human rights to which everyone was entitled. However, the corresponding responsibilities of states, individuals etc to respect these rights were also included. For some, the possession of a human right is more important than the reciprocal duty to secure that right; but, for others, the reciprocal duty to secure a human right is maybe more important than the right itself. These are issues which this chapter explores.