really hateful is its objective or its severity. Here we have to look back at the
political language dimension of human rights and recognize that the debate on how
best to characterize torture may be merely a matter of words but that these words
have accrued a large degree of political capital, and therefore a lot depends on the
resolution of the debate.
The power of certain labels can also be seen in the political and academic debate on
whether the killings still taking place in Darfur can be called a “genocide”. To some degree
what is being discussed is not really what the facts are, but how to categorize them, and
many feel that if the situation were to be called “genocide”, the international response
would be more forthcoming.International Crimes Violations of integrity rights tend to be considered particu-
larly severe. Most international crimes or categories of crimes, such as genocide,
torture, crimes against humanity, or war crimes, involve violations of integrity
rights.
12.6.3 Freedom Rights
Under freedom rights, we categorize the rights that traditionally have been consid-
ered as mostly “negative” and hence are called “freedoms.”
“Freedom” rights create a sphere of autonomy for individuals, in which the state
may not intervene. In practice, freedom rights include, most prominently, freedom
of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of movement,
freedom of association, and the right to privacy.
Together with the political rights and the right to property, the freedom rights
form the core of the so-called bourgeois rights, rights that have historically been
associated with the rise of civil government and mercantile power in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.
Limitations Almost all freedom rights expressly allow for limitations when the
public good is at stake. Such limitations vary from banning television programs that
are deemed to be harmful to minors to allowing surveillance of private
conversations to stop criminal activities.
The Right to Property In a sense, the right to property may be characterized as
just another freedom right, which requires that the state does not interfere with,
devalue, or take one’s property. However, some of its characteristics warrant that
the right to property is treated separately.
First, property is not an interest that existed before the law protected it by rights.
Property itself is a creation of the law, and the right to property may be understood
as a guarantee for the existence of some system of property.
Second, the creation of property does not merely exclude interference with the
object of the right by others than the owner, but it alsomakes it possibleto transfer
or encumber one’s own property.
276 G. Arosemena