Every time a court strikes down an unlawful detention, or an activist demands clean water for a slum, they are drawing on an idea that took centuries to crystallise: that certain entitlements belong to people simply because they are human. Human rights are not gifts handed out by a generous government. They are claims that exist before any constitution is written, and they continue to exist even when a state refuses to honour them. This post traces how that idea is defined philosophically, how it took root in this country, how it differs from related concepts, and how it became binding international law.
Table of Contents
Defining human rights
At their core, human rights are understood as universal, inherent, and moral claims held by every person. They are universal because everyone is born with the same rights regardless of nationality, gender, religion, or social background. They are inalienable, meaning they cannot legitimately be stripped away. And they are indivisible: civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights all carry equal weight, and the denial of one tends to undermine the others.
The word moral is doing important work here. Human rights are not only legal entitlements written into statute books. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, human rights can be understood as existing independently of legal enactment, as norms that almost all human moralities recognise, such as the prohibition on the intentional killing of innocent people. In other words, a right can be real even where no law protects it. That is precisely why the language of human rights is so powerful when citizens confront an unjust state.
Wasserstrom’s criteria
The philosopher Richard Wasserstrom gave this idea a sharper edge in his influential 1964 essay Rights, Human Rights, and Racial Discrimination. Wasserstrom argued that human rights have distinctive features that separate them from ordinary rights. First, they belong to all human beings simply by virtue of being human, not because of citizenship, status, or achievement. Second, because everyone possesses them equally, they cannot serve as the basis for discrimination between groups.
His reasoning was elegant. If the reason we say a person has a right not to be made to suffer acute physical pain is that all human beings genuinely value freedom from such pain, then everyone with that same capacity must hold the same right. There is no rational basis to grant it to one race or group and deny it to another. This is why Wasserstrom treated racial discrimination as both a logical and a moral mistake: it assumes a difference in entitlement where no morally relevant difference exists. His framework remains a standard reference point for explaining why human rights resist being rationed.
Genesis of human rights in India
While the philosophical idea is old, the organised human rights movement in this country is relatively young, and its catalyst was a moment of profound state overreach. The movement found its real germination during the National Emergency of 1975 to 1977 and developed strongly in the years that followed.
On 25 June 1975, a state of emergency was declared, granting the executive sweeping authority. As the 21-month Emergency unfolded, more than one hundred thousand political opponents, journalists, and dissenters were imprisoned, the press was censored, and fundamental rights were suspended. By 1976, the abuses had deepened. A mass sterilisation drive spearheaded by Sanjay Gandhi imposed aggressive family-planning targets that fell hardest on the poor, and slum demolitions displaced thousands. Police firing at Delhi’s Turkman Gate and at an anti-sterilisation protest in Muzaffarnagar left hundreds dead.
This was the period that taught an entire generation what an unchecked state could do to its own citizens. Civil liberties groups, lawyers, and ordinary people began organising specifically to defend rights, splitting broadly into two strands: a civil liberties concern focused on protecting people from state power, and a rights-based perspective that pushed for the entitlements of marginalised communities. Over the following decades, this movement was enriched by tribal struggles, peasant movements, the women’s movement, Dalit assertion, child rights campaigns, and environmental activism.
The institutional response came later. The National Human Rights Commission was constituted in 1993 under the Protection of Human Rights Act, giving the country a statutory body to investigate violations and recommend remedies. The Act defines human rights as those relating to the life, liberty, equality, and dignity of the individual, guaranteed by the Constitution or embodied in international covenants and enforceable by courts. The journey from the suspended rights of the Emergency to a dedicated rights commission shows how a crisis can reshape a nation’s legal conscience.
Human rights versus natural rights
Human rights are often confused with two related ideas: natural rights and legal rights. Distinguishing them clarifies a great deal.
The natural rights tradition
Natural rights are described as natural in the sense of not being artificial or man-made. They are thought to derive from human nature itself or, in older formulations, from divine order. They are universal, apply to all people, do not depend on the laws of any particular society, and cannot be taken away. The classic example is the natural right to life. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, the doctrine of human rights rests on the claim that there is a rationally identifiable moral order whose authority precedes social and historical conditions and applies to all people everywhere and at all times.
This tradition has deep philosophical roots. Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, distinguished natural justice from legal justice, arguing that the natural has the same validity everywhere and does not depend on whether people accept it. Later thinkers in the natural law tradition built on this to argue that a higher moral standard could be used to judge whether actual human laws were legitimate. The American and French revolutionary declarations of the eighteenth century drew directly on this language of inalienable, natural rights.
The legal rights contrast
Legal rights work very differently. They are based on a society’s customs, statutes, and the actions of its legislatures. The right to vote is a good example: it is granted by a legal system to citizens, and its scope is defined by law. A legal right exists because a particular authority created it, and that same authority can, in principle, alter or remove it.
So where do human rights sit? They straddle both. As a moral matter they resemble natural rights, existing independently of any statute. As a practical matter, they become far more secure once they are written into binding law. Modern human rights inherited the universalism of the natural rights tradition while shedding much of its reliance on a single religious or metaphysical foundation, which is why people of very different worldviews can still agree on a shared list of protections.
International covenants and the UDHR
The decisive shift from philosophy to global standard came after the Second World War. The horrors of that conflict pushed nations to agree, for the first time, on a common list of inalienable entitlements.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
On 10 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Its opening article proclaims that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, a sentence that captures the universality at the heart of the whole idea. The Declaration set out a comprehensive list covering civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights, and it has profoundly shaped human rights law ever since.
There was, however, a limitation. The UDHR is a declaration, not a treaty, and it carries no direct force of law. It set a shared moral standard but could not by itself compel governments to act. That gap had to be filled by binding instruments.
The two covenants and the International Bill of Human Rights
That work took nearly two decades. In December 1966, the General Assembly adopted two binding treaties: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Both entered into force in 1976. Together with the UDHR, these form what the United Nations calls the International Bill of Human Rights.
The division between the two reflected Cold War tensions over which rights mattered most. The ICCPR protects rights such as life, freedom of speech, religion, fair trial, and protection from arbitrary detention. The ICESCR covers food, education, health, work, and an adequate standard of living. Crucially, the ICESCR uses the principle of progressive realisation, acknowledging that poorer states cannot deliver universal healthcare or housing overnight, while still requiring measurable progress over time.
This country ratified both covenants in 1979, a decision that signalled its formal commitment to align domestic law with international standards. Many ICCPR guarantees correspond to the Fundamental Rights in Part III of the Constitution, while the socio-economic concerns of the ICESCR are reflected in the Directive Principles of State Policy. The later creation of the National Human Rights Commission gave these international obligations a domestic enforcement mechanism, closing the loop between global promise and national practice.
What do you think? If human rights exist as moral claims even where no law protects them, what is the real value of writing them into binding covenants? And looking at the lessons of the 1975 Emergency, how well do you think a country’s institutions would resist a similar suspension of rights today?
References
- https://www.unfpa.org/resources/human-rights-principles
- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights-human/
- https://www.jstor.org/stable/2023445
- https://www.britannica.com/event/the-Emergency-India
- https://nhrc.nic.in/international-covenant-on-civil-and-political-rights-(iccpr)
- https://iep.utm.edu/hum-rts/
- https://www.ohchr.org/en/what-are-human-rights/international-bill-human-rights
Leave a Reply