rights again Re: [governance] Inputs ...

[Tapani Tarvainen]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 02:23:45PM +0200, Avri Doria (avri at psg.com) wrote:

> On 3 Sep 2008, at 13:07, Jeanette Hofmann wrote:
>
>> A narrow interpretation restricts rights to those that enable rights  
>> holders to file a suit against those who violate the right. I don't  
>> see who could be held accountable for the lack of "an Internet in ones 
>> own language". The latter might be a political goal but it certainly 
>> doesn't sound like a right to me.

> While i agree that we have to be careful with devaluation of rights by  
> making the definition too broad, this would argue that there are no  
> rights without authority - the prerequisite  of 'someone to be held  
> accountable' that is being offered in several people definitions.

The party being held accountable does not have to be authority of
any kind, nor does the requirement of accountability imply there
has to be an authority of some kind.
Murderers are accountable for their actions, whether or not there
is a police or someone else enforcing it.

> i believe we have rights, i would call them fundamental rights, on  
> account of our definition of what it  means to be human within a society 
> and not because we have someone to hold accountable.  Holding someone 
> accountable is secondary to the existence of a right not the  
> prerequisite for one.

I am not sure what a right of a person would even mean if it didn't
include, explicitly or implicitly, that someone else act or refrain
from acting in some specific way. One person's rights are others'
obligations.

All rights, even right to life would be meaningless if you were the
only person on Earth. It is not a right to be guaranteed eternal life,
nor even that someone has to provide you means to survive, but an
obligation on others not to kill you.

> People had rights before the UDHR was adopted,  
> they just were not spelled out in that form.

Sure. Nor would I restrict rights to legal rights, let alone require
there has to be someone you can sue. But the point remains: if you
have a right, there must be someone to whom it is an obligation.
And that someone should be sufficiently concrete that, at least
in theory, it can eventually be traced to individual people.
A purely abstract "body politic" or the like doesn't cut it, IMHO.

> There are rights that are fundamental because we are human and that is  
> how we have agreed to define being human, some of these rights have been 
> guaranteed, minus caveats like article 29, in the UDHR.

Some (indeed rather many) of those do presume the existence of
an authority, if not explicitly a state, and many even a certain
level of wealth. I dislike including such rights as definitive
to being human - as I see it, that would imply poverty (at least
global such) would deprive people of their humanity as well.

But perhaps I should yield to the more forgiving interpretation that
such rights are implicitly limited by circumstances, have an implicit
"as long as we can afford it" -clause.
And after all, the UDHR has become the authoritative definition
of "human rights", so I won't argue with that, although I still
consider such rights a lesser subcategory thereof.

The point, however, extends to other, less fundamantal rights.
If you have no idea who is thereby obligated to do something,
they don't have much meaning.

> As an argument, the right to Internet for all in all languages could
> be interpreted as being a requirement by which a fundamental right -
> education can be met.

Yes. And it can be interpreted as an obligation to Internet
designers to not prevent or hamper it being used in whatever
languate one chooses. But if you intepret it as a positive right,
i.e., that Internet should be provided to you ready-made in your 
own language, I ask: who should pay for it?

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen
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