VI-g. Having vs. Realizing Rights
One way to find out how individuals think about human rights is to ask how they would assess the status of particular human rights in a particular country. For many (such as Jabine1992, and Spirer1993), the answer is that you look at the situation, and see if people speak freely, practice their religions, are adequately nourished, and so on.
This approach misses something important. One can sometimes speak freely even if there is no specific freedom of speech; one can be employed even if there is no right to employment; one can be adequately nourished even if there is no right to nutrition. It is important to know whether the human rights that we all have are translated into hard local rights in the form of specific entitlements and specific commitments. The best place to look is in the local law.
If you want to know whether people have a particular legal right locally, you look at the law. If you want to know whether the right is realized—which is a different question—you look at how people are living, and compare that with the law. To illustrate, Humana asked whether "Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state" in each country of the world (Humana 1992). In our view he should have distinguished two different questions: Does the country have that right clearly enshrined in national law? And then if it does: Is the right fully realized by all of its people?
It is important to distinguish between, say, speaking freely and having a right to free speech, or between having good nutrition and having a right to good nutrition. To draw an analogy, you can't tell how much protection people have against, say, fire, by asking people if their houses are on fire at the moment. To assess the quality of the protection one has to look into the institutional arrangements that are in place, ready to act if and when disaster threatens. Nutrition rights require action by government to protect against the occurrence of malnutrition and to remedy it if it does occur. In other words, drawing on the distinction made in Subsection II-f, nutrition rights are about nutrition security, not just nutrition status. The realization of nutrition rights requires appropriate institutional arrangements to assure that people are and remain well nourished.
The fact that most people in any given country are well fed tells us nothing about the situation of marginalized people, and it says nothing about what might happen in the future if wealth declines or government priorities change. In the United States, for example, most people are adequately nourished, and there are major programs in place to help those who may be malnourished, but there is nothing in national law that establishes a right to good nutrition.
National legislation is not required to assure that people have particular rights. Human rights are universal--by definition. Thus, children in the United States and Somalia have all of the rights enumerated in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The fact that their governments have not ratified the convention does not mean those children do not have these rights. The failure to ratify only means that their governments have not made a commitment to assure the realization of those rights. Ratifying human rights agreements, and following up with appropriate national legislation, are strong signs of the nation's commitment to the realization of those human rights. Appropriate national legislation can increase the likehood of the realization of particular human rights.
Continue to VII-a. Moral Responsibilities
Subsection VI-g last updated on October 27, 1999