When Everything Is a Human Right, Nothing Is

Tbroadly covered in the media. But given the myriad challenges to human rights today, rethinking some widely accepted human rights assumptions seems timely.

The cause of human rights is imperiled in every region—from negligence, from weakness, from deliberate denial, and from proliferation. The world’s inability to hold states such as Syria, Yemen, and China accountable for gross human rights violations has led many to question the very idea of universal rights. Countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan are allowed to sit on international bodies such as the United Nations Human Rights Council—they are all currently members—and the institutions are losing their authority. Calls to make everything from access to the internet to free employment counseling a human right have cheapened the meaning and multiplied the clashes of rights. The context in which the rights movement operates has changed dramatically since the turn of the millennium. Whereas many emerging states once accepted human rights ideas out of deference to Western accomplishment or power, today they push back when Western-funded organizations use the human rights label to promote ideas that are not widely shared.

Some disagreements over human rights come from repressive regimes or communal leaders, and such complaints are easy to dismiss. But when critiques come from people who are sympathetic to the cause of human rights, they reflect something more fundamentally troubling.

How did an idea once powerful enough to unify a vast range of people in struggles against totalitarianism and apartheid become so impotent?How did an idea once powerful enough to unify a vast range of people in struggles against totalitarianism and apartheid become so impotent? A major factor, ironically, was the overweening dual ambition born of those successes. Human rights advocates have broadened the scope of issues covered by human rights while narrowing the room for differences in bringing those rights to life. In so doing, they misconstrue the original goals of human rights, most clearly embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the foundation for much of the post-1945 rights project.


https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/06/when-everything-is-a-human-right-nothing-is/


Very interesting article and more to read on the link

Only negative rights are actual rights. Positive rights supported by many are actually an entitlement supported by some sort of legislation.

If someone else has to do something for me to exercise a right, its not a right.