Classification of Human Rights and it's significance

Human rights classifications

1. b) Classification of Human Rights Human rights can be classified into Civil, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Civil Rights : Civil rights are those rights which enable an individual to lead a normal social life. These civil rights are protected by the States. These rights are otherwise described as civil liberties. The main liberties are freedom of speech and expression, freedom to form association and assembly, equality before law and equal protection of laws.

2. Political Rights : Political rights are of paramount importance, as they provide a basis for working of a democratic government. Democracy is governed by consent, public opinion or public criticism through public participation in decision-making. The important political rights include right to vote, right to free and fair elections, right to take active participation on governmental decision-making, right to claim corrupt-free government, right to recall and referendum .

3. The individual has the right to stand for election, right to use public office, right to petition and criticize the government. Political rights provide equal opportunity for all to take part in political life. Political rights that protect the liberty to participate in politics by expressing themselves, protesting, participating in a republic.

4. However, at UN level, The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights  and its  First Optional Protocol  entered into force in 1976 and the  Second Optional Protocol  came into force in 1991. The  Human Rights Committee  monitors the implementation of this multilateral treaty and its Optional Protocols.

5. The Covenant deals with such rights as freedom of movement; equality before the law; the right to a fair trial and presumption of innocence; freedom of thought, conscience and religion; freedom of opinion and expression; peaceful assembly; freedom of association; participation in public affairs and elections; and protection of minority rights. 

6. It prohibits arbitrary deprivation of life; torture, cruel or degrading treatment or punishment; slavery and forced labour ; arbitrary arrest or detention; arbitrary interference with privacy; war propaganda; discrimination; and advocacy of racial or religious hatred.

7. Economic Rights : The right to life and a worthy manner of living required certain economic rights. The chief among them are right to employment, right to fair wages, right to humane conditions of work and the right to equal pay for equal work. These economic rights fulfill the basic livelihood of human being.

8. Social Rights : Social rights of human being lay emphasis on social equality. The individual has the right of not being an isoIated member of the society and the State. The social discrimination and oppression generally arises from harmful traditions such as those based on caste, religion, race, colour and sex. These social divisions are the social evils and the social rights protect the individual from these evils. Cultural rights : Cultural rights are those rights that help to preserve their culture and heritage both in their public and private life.

9. However, at UN level , The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights  entered into force in 1976. The  Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights  is the body of 18  independent experts  that monitors implementation of the Covenant by its States parties. Its Optional  Protocol  entered into force in 2013.

10. The human rights that the Covenant seeks to promote and protect include the right to work in just and favourable conditions ; the right to social protection, to an adequate standard of living and to the highest attainable standards of physical and mental well-being ; and the right to education and the enjoyment of benefits of cultural freedom and scientific progress.

11. Generational Human Rights Based on the origin, development and usage amongst people in the international arena generational human rights have been further classified as follows: First Generational Human Rights: Civil and Political Rights are included under this category

12. Second Generational Human Rights : These include Economic and Social Rights. Third Generational Human Rights : Environmental Protection and Right to Economic Development have been put under this category. Fourth Generational Human Rights : Rights of the Child and the Woman have come under this.

13. However, the "three generations of human rights" advanced by the French jurist Karel Vasak . They are such as the first generation of civil and political rights ; the second generation of economic, social, and cultural rights ; and the third generation of newly called solidarity rights.

14. The First Generation Rights (Civil and political rights) These rights began to emerge as a theory during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and were based mostly on political concerns. It had begun to be recognised that there were certain things that the all-powerful rulers should not be able to do and that people should have some influence over the policies that affected them. The two central ideas were those of personal liberty, and of protecting the individual against violations by the state.

15. Civil and political rights today are set out in detail in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and in the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR ), and they include rights such as the right to participate in government and the prohibition of torture. These rights have traditionally been regarded by many at least in "the West" as the most important human rights.

16. During the Cold War, the countries of the Soviet block were severely criticised for their disregard of civil and political rights. These countries responded by criticising the western democracies, in turn, for ignoring key social and economic rights. Human rights are prone to political abuse.

17. "States and the international community as a whole continue to tolerate all too often breaches of economic, social and cultural rights which, if they occurred in relation to civil and political rights, would provoke expressions of horror and outrage and would lead to concerted calls for immediate remedial action .“ Statement to the Vienna Conference by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 1993.

18. However, the first generation of civil and political rights derives primarily from the 17th- and 18th-century reformist, which are associated with the English, American, and French revolutions . Infused with the political philosophy of liberal individualism and the economic and social doctrine of laissez-faire, it conceives of human rights more in negative ("freedoms from") than positive ("rights to") terms; it favours the abstention rather than the intervention of government in the quest for human dignity, as epitomized by the statement attributed to H. L. Mencken that ". . . all government is, of course, against liberty.

19. Belonging to this first generation, thus, are such claimed rights as are set forth in Articles 2-21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including freedom from racial and equivalent forms of discrimination; the right to life, liberty, and the security of the person; freedom from slavery or involuntary servitude; freedom from torture and from cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; freedom from arbitrary arrest, detention, or exile; the right to a fair and public trial; freedom from interference in privacy and correspondence ; freedom of movement and residence; the right to asylum from persecution; freedom of thought, conscience, and religion; freedom or opinion and expression; freedom of peaceful assembly and association; and the right to participate in government, directly or through free elections.

20. Also included is the right to own property and the right not to be deprived of one's property arbitrarily, each fundamental to the interests fought for in the American and French revolutions and to the rise of capitalism. What is constant in this first generation concept is the notion of liberty . A shield that safeguards the individual alone and in association with others against the abuse, and misuse of political authority.

21. The Second Generation Rights( Social, economic and cultural rights) These rights concern how people live and work together and the basic necessities of life. They are based on the ideas of equality and guaranteed access to essential social and economic goods, services, and opportunities. They became increasingly a subject of international recognition with the effects of early industrialization and the rise of a working class.

22. These led to new demands and new ideas about the meaning of a life of dignity. People realised that human dignity required more than the minimal lack of interference from the state as proposed by the civil and political rights. Social , economic and cultural rights are outlined in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and also in the European Social Charter of the Council of Europe.

23. Social, economic and cultural rights are based on the ideas of equality and guaranteed  access to essential social and economic goods, services, and opportunities . Social rights are those that are necessary for full participation in the life of society. They include at least the right to education and the right to found and maintain a family but also many of the rights often regarded as 'civil' rights. For example, the rights to recreation, health care, privacy and freedom from discrimination.

24. Economic rights are normally thought to include the right to work, to an adequate standard of living, to housing and the right to a pension if you are old or disabled. The economic rights reflect the fact that a certain minimal level of material security is necessary for human dignity, and also the fact that, for example, a lack of meaningful employment or housing can be psychologically demeaning.

25. Cultural Rights refer to a community's cultural "way of life" and are often given less attention than many of the other types of rights. They include the right to participate freely in the cultural life of the community and, possibly, also the right to education. However , many other rights, not officially classed as "cultural" will be essential for minority communities within a society to preserve their distinctive culture.For example, the right to non-discrimination and equal protection of the law.

26. However, the Second Generation of economic, social and cultural rights finds its origins primarily in the socialist tradition that was foreshadowed among the Saint Simonians of early 19 th century France and variously promoted by revolutionary struggles and welfare movements ever since .

27. In large part, it is a response to the abuses and misuses of capitalist development and its underlying, essentially uncritical conception of individual liberty that tolerated, even legitimated the exploitation of working classes and colonial peoples.

28. Historically, it is counterpoint to the first generation of civil and political rights with human rights conceived more in positive( rights to) than negative ("freedoms from") terms requiring the intervention not the abstention of the State for the purpose of assuring equitable participation in the production and distribution of values involved.

29. Illustrative are the claimed rights set forth in Articles 22-27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights such as the right to social security, the right to work, and to protection against unemployment, the right to rest and leisure including periodic holidays with pay , the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well being of self and family , the right to education, and the right to the protection of one’s scientific, literary and artistic production.

30. The Third Generation Rights( Solidarity rights) The examples are Right to development, right to peace, right to a healthy environment, to humanitarian assistance. The list of internationally recognised human rights has not remained constant. Although none of the rights listed in the UDHR has been brought into serious question in over 60 years of its existence, new treaties and documents have clarified and further developed some of the basic concepts that were laid down in that original document.

31. These additions have been a result of a number of factors: they have partly come about as a response to changing ideas about human dignity, and partly as a result of new threats and opportunities emerging. In the case of the specific new category of rights that have been proposed as third generation rights, these have been the consequence of a deeper understanding of the different types of obstacles that may stand in the way of realising the first and second generation rights.

32. The idea at the basis of the third generation of rights is that of  solidarity ; and the rights embrace collective rights of society or peoples, such as the right to sustainable development, to peace or to a healthy environment. In much of the world, conditions such as extreme poverty, war, ecological and natural disasters have meant that there has been only very limited progress in respect of human rights.

33. The specific rights that are most commonly included within the category of third generation rights are the rights to development, to peace, to a healthy environment, to share in the exploitation of the common heritage of mankind, to communication and  humanitarian assistance.

34. There has, however, been some debate concerning this category of rights. Some experts object to the idea of these rights because they are ‘collective rights', in the sense of being held by communities or even whole states. They argue that human rights can only be held by individuals. The argument is more than merely verbal, because some people fear such a change in terminology could provide a "justification" for certain repressive regimes to deny (individual) human rights in the name of these collective human rights; for example, severely curtailing civil rights in order to secure "economic development".

35. There is another concern which is sometimes expressed. Since it is not the state but the international community that is meant to safeguard third generation rights, accountability is impossible to guarantee.  Who, or what, is supposed to be responsible for making sure that there is peace in the Caucasus( an area in SE Europe and SW Asia, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea) or the Middle East( The Middle East is a geopolitical region encompassing the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq) , or that the Amazonian rainforest( Forest in Brazil) is not destroyed and that appropriate measures are taken against climate change?.

36. Some collective rights have already been recognised , in particular under the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights and the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The UDHR itself includes the right to self-determination and a human right to development was codified in a 1986 UN General Assembly Declaration.

37. The right to development is an inalienable human right by virtue of which every human person and all peoples are entitled to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development, in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realised (UN Declaration on the Right to Development).

38. However, the third generation of solidarity rights , while drawing upon, interlinking, and re conceptualizing value demands associated with the two earlier generations of rights, are best understood as a product , albeit one still in formation, of both the rise and the decline of the nation-state in the last half of the 20th century. Foreshadowed in Article 28 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which proclaims that“ everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized ," it appears so far to embrace six claimed rights.

39. Three of these reflect the emergence of Third World nationalism and its demand for a global redistribution of power, wealth, and other important values such as the right to political, economic, social , and cultural self-determination; the right to economic and social develop- ment ; and the right to participate in and benefit from "the common heritage of mankind" (shared Earth-space resources; scientific, technical, and other information and progress; and cultural traditions, sites, and monuments ).

40. The other three third-generation rights-the right to peace, the right to a healthy and balanced environment, and the right to humanitarian disaster relief -suggest the impotence or inefficiency of the nation-state in certain critical respects.

41. All six of these claimed rights tend to be posed as collective rights , requiring the concerted efforts of all social forces, to substantial degree on a planetary scale, and implying a quest for a possible utopia that projects the notion of holistic community interests.

42. Each, however, manifests an individual as well as collective dimension. For example, while it may be said to be the collective right of all countries and peoples, especially developing countries and non-self-governing peoples to secure a new international economic order that would eliminate obstacles to their economic and social development, so also may it be said to be the individual right of all persons to benefit from a developmental policy that is based on the satisfaction of material and nonmaterial human needs.

43. Also, while the right to self-determination and the right to humanitarian assistance, for example find expression on the legal as well as the moral plane, the majority of these solidarity rights tend to be more aspirational than justiciable in character , enjoying as yet an ambiguous jural status as international human rights norms.

44. The classi fi cation of human rights organizations The classi fi cation of human rights organizations into “ First World ” and “ Third World ” also signi fi es their different physical bases, sizes, ideological concerns , types of human rights in focus, and strategies . Comparatively speaking, First World human rights organizations are committed to the liberal tradition with an emphasis on the protection of political and civil rights, the fi rst generation of rights.

45. The Third World ones give priority to economic and social rights, the second generation of rights (Steiner 1991 ). In other terminologies, “ ideal ” human rights organizations , which focus on political and civil rights, such as Amnesty International are distinguished from “ operational ” human rights organizations, which emphasize social, economic, and cultural rights such as Oxfam or Green Peace ( Wiseberg ).

46. Human rights are also classified as follows: Security rights: that prohibit crimes such as murder enforced involuntary suicide, massacre, torture and rape. Liberty rights : that protect freedoms in areas such as belief and religion, association, assembling and movement.

47. Due process rights : that protect against abuses of the legal system such as arrest and imprisonment without trial, secret trials and excessive punishments. Equality rights: that guarantee equal citizenship, equality before the law and non-discrimination. Welfare rights: (also known as economic rights) that require the provision for education, paid holidays, and protection against severe poverty and starvation. Group tights : right to form associations and assemble peacefully.