[governance] Rights {was: Taking down a site [was: beijing ticket scam])

[Milton L Mueller]

I respect very much Lisa's attempt to invoke the international human
rights system, and in fact I _used_ to agree with her perspective on
that until the last year or so. It is certainly a discussion worth
having, and I guess the Internet Bill of Rights folks, among others, are
having it.

And I _totally_ support and agree with Anriette, when she says:

> -----Original Message-----
> hand it is often just because they don't
> understand what rights are and how the
> principles should underpin new areas of policy.

The problem I have now is that after exposure to the international human
rights system and the way it is actually applied I find the term
"rights" has become so overextended and overused that the term has very
little value to someone who has specific free expression and civil
liberties protections in mind. As Anriette suggests, part of the problem
is just a lack of understanding of how to apply the term, but the more
fundamental problem is that there is no consensus on a specific
philosophical foundation for rights, we routinely conflate collective
and individual rights, we proliferate rights that are inconsistent with
each other, we combine positive and negative rights, etc., etc. 

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