Ch 15Rights — Class 11 Political Science, concept-first.

In everyday life, the word 'right' comes up constantly — the right to vote, the right to form a political party, the right to contest an election.

A right, in the sense this chapter uses the word, is not just anything a person wants — it is an entitlement or a justified claim: something we consider is due to us, and something the rest of society…

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, political theorists argued that rights are given to human beings by nature or by God — an idea known as natural rights, derived from natural law.

Appeals to human rights work on our moral sense, but how successful such appeals actually are depends heavily on one thing above all: whether governments and the law support them.

Most democracies begin by drawing up a charter of political rights: rights that give citizens equality before the law and the right to take part in the political process, including the right to vote,…

Rights are not a one-way street where the state and other people simply owe things to an individual — having rights also places real responsibilities on each of us, in at least four ways.

On 10 December 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) — the document that gives the ideas of universal human dignity d…