Basically, human rights refer to all human beings having universal status to which all are entitled simply by being human. It is not limited to providing all human beings with the needs for their physical subsistence but involves a certain degree of minimal comfort beyond merely keeping one’s organs working because human subsistence also consists of being able to function. Having grown out of the liberal traditions of the 18th century Europe, the concept had roots in the philosophical traditions of most civilizations which ranged for over 2000 years. The main idea of Aristotle that like should be treated alike remained a motivating factor in the history of human existence.
Typically human rights are categorized as two, negative human rights and positive human rights. The concept of negative human rights denotes actions that a government should not take as it follows mainly the Anglo-American tradition. It was codified in the USA’s Bill of Rights, the English Bill of Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom and include freedom of speech, religion and assembly.
On the other hand, positive human rights denote rights that the state is obliged to protect and provide. It follows mainly the Rousseauian Continental European legal tradition and is codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in many constitutions of the contemporary world. Examples of such rights include:Â the right to education, to a livelihood, and to legal equality. The legal concept of human rights is itself the product of a specific process of history. In Europe it emerged as a consequence of the political and legal values gained from 16th century Renaissance and 18th century Enlightenment. Â In later centuries even the legal frameworks also began to be based on liberal and Marxist philosophies. While the liberal philosophers from Locke to Rawls thought of individual rights in terms of personal freedom, Marx considered rights in a bourgeois framework as constraints on human freedom. Further these two schools of thought also differ in their analysis of the relation between the individual and the collective. While liberals have always interpreted this relation in terms of the private and the public, the logic of Marxists has always been to create the conditions for greater human solidarity through resolution of tensions rooted in the structures of dominance, the power and property, in particular.
The basic themes of human security have been elaborated in a series of reports prepared by multinational independent commissions composed of prominent leaders, intellectuals and academics. In the early years of the 1970s, the Club of Rome groups produced a series of volumes on the ‘World problematique’ which narrated “a complex of problems troubling men of all nations: poverty; degradation of the environment; loss of faith in institutions; uncontrolled urban spread; insecurity of employment; alienation of youth; rejection of traditional values; and inflation and other monetary and economic disruptions.” The said report further laid stress on a state of global equilibrium to be designed so that ‘the basic material needs of each person are satisfied, and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential’.
In line with this, the 1980s witnessed two independent commissions in order to change thinking on development and security. The first was the Independent Commission on International Development Issues chaired by Willy Brandt and second, the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues, chaired by Olof Palme. The first Commission issued the North-South report in 1980 and in its introduction, it noted that the heart of the matter was the “will to overcome dangerous tensions and to produce significant and useful results for nations and regions- but first and foremost, for human beings- in all parts of the world”. It also argued the necessity of a North-South engagement for development. The second Commission authored the famous Common Security report which drew attention towards alternative ways of thinking about peace and security. Apart from focussing on military issues and the staples of national security, it acknowledged that in the Third World security was also threatened by “poverty, deprivation, and economic inequality”.
In a nutshell, human security relates directly to the protection of every individual simply by being a human. In the Post-Cold War phase, a clear-cut thinking and action as well have taken a concrete shape in this regard which have focussed, in place of the classical notion of state security, on the safety of the individual and is or her values thereof. Though in the sphere of ideational and institutional frameworks and issues, they both are different, but successes in human and national security areas have become mutually supportive and failure in either will reciprocally weaken the other.
A new thinking in matters of human security began to grow rapidly with the end of Cold War in the first part of the 1990s. First the Stockholm Initiative on Global Security and Governance issued a call for “Common Responsibility in the 1990s. It referred to challenges to security other than political rivalry and armaments and dealt also with threats that stem from failures in development, environmental degradation, excessive population growth and movement, and lack of progress towards democracy. Â Four years later its sentiments were echoed in the Commission on Global Governance’s report, “Our Global Neighbourhood” which maintained that the concept of global security must be broadened from the traditional focus on the security of states to include the security of people and the security of the planet. These reports were the precursors to human security thinking which led us to an explicitly human security perspective with some vigour.
The concept of human security and human rights is incomplete without human development. Generally, while analysing human development, three approaches are used to measure the well-being of the people. The first one is, physical quality of life index which contains three indicators–adult literacy rate, infant mortality and life expectancy. The second approach is the basic needs approach which argues that the basic needs of adequate nutrition, primary education, health sanitation, water supply and housing are available to the poorest to a reasonable extent. The last, being the human development index approach, is the most widely used index. According to the Human Development Report 2005, published by the UNDP, all the 177 countries in total are categorized into three broad groups: High Human Development, Medium Human Development and Low Human Development. In this report India is placed in the Medium Human Development countries and ranks at 127 among them.
In a nutshell, human security relates directly to the protection of every individual simply by being a human. In the Post-Cold War phase, a clear-cut thinking and action as well have taken a concrete shape in this regard which have focussed, in place of the classical notion of state security, on the safety of the individual and is or her values thereof. Though in the sphere of ideational and institutional frameworks and issues, they both are different, but successes in human and national security areas have become mutually supportive and failure in either will reciprocally weaken the other.
