Human Rights
12
Gustavo Arosemena
12.1 Introduction
From Rules to Rights One natural way to look at the law is to see it as a collection
of rules laid down by a competent authority that tell us in more or less concrete
terms what we should do, what is required, prohibited and permitted. This view of
the law has been the dominant one for many centuries, and probably still is.
Relatively recently, however, another way of looking at the law has been gaining
in popularity. This view does not focus on the specific rules that have been laid
down to guide our behavior but rather on the interests of the human beings that the
law should aim to protect. This view, requiring more than just compliance with the
rules, requires that the rules have a certain content, that they should aim at the
pursuance of the interests of human beings, that they should be interpreted in a way
that furthers these interests, and that rules that definitively run counter to human
interests should be discarded. One such way of thinking is couched in the term
human rights.
This change in emphasis has had a great impact on legal reasoning because
human rights are often not very specific about which kind of behavior they require.
Take for instance Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which
reads: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.” On its own,
this text leaves much to be said for one who must determine what this human right
implies in practice. Many human rights are protected by means of international
treaties, and the judicial interpretation of these treaties has created a body of case
law that gives the abstract proclamations of human rights hands and feet. However,
this does not change the fact that human rights law is not primarily based on explicit
rules that guide individual conduct but on interests that should shape the law and
orient human and institutional behavior.
G. Arosemena (*)
Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands
e-mail:[email protected]
J. Hage and B. Akkermans (eds.),Introduction to Law,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-06910-4_12,#Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
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