Authors: Nohlen
Summary: In about 870 words the entry defines the concept, discusses the potential and actual conflict between human and political rights, traces the extension of basic human rights in modern democratic states, and discusses the role of human rights during the East-West conflict. The entry defines human rights as all those individual rights humans possesses by nature, that is independent of their role as citizens of a particular country. While the idea of human rights was already part of the Roman law codex, they gained more prominence in the fight of the bourgeoisie to achieve equality to the feudal and absolutist classes. As the entry states, contract theorists like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau argued that while humans paces the right to everything necessary for their survival, in order to organize a functioning community the members have to give up part of their natural rights. However, as Lock argues, each individual paces a basic right to life, liberty and property (which includes material and spiritual property, i.e. religion). But only those who actually have property are according to Locke also entitled to political rights (which includes active and passive voting rights). In Marx's critique, the potential conflict between human and political rights - captured in the distinction between the bourgeois and the citoyen - becomes obvious. He therefore envisioned a socialist system in which both forms of rights become unnecessary since each individual can fully develop itself, Modern democratic states, on the other hand, have extended the basic human rights catalogue with a variety of social rights. For example, the right to live has been extended in many countries with a right to earn a minimum income (other examples in entry). The entry ends with a reference to the role of human rights during the Cold War, which the West always pointed to as lacking in the socialist regimes while the latter pointed to the lack of social rights in the West.