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9 Bull. Austl. Soc. Leg. Phil. 148 (1985)
Human Rights, Peoples' Rights

handle is hein.journals/ajlph9 and id is 154 raw text is: HUMAN RIGHTS, PEOPLES' RIGHTS by Eugene Kamenka Rights are claims that have achieved a special kind of endorsement or success: legal rights by a legal system; human rights by widespread sentiment or an international order. All rights arise in specific historical circumstances. They are claims made, conceded or granted by people who are themselves historically and socially shaped. They are asserted by people on their own behalf or as perceived and endorsed implications of specific historical traditions, institutions and arrangements or of a historically conditioned theory of human needs and human aspirations, or of a human conception of a Divine plan and purpose. In objective fact as opposed to (some) subjective feeling, they are neither eternal nor inalienable, neither prior to society or societies nor independent of them. Some such rights can be singled out, and they often are singled out, as social ideals, as goals to strive toward. But even as such, they cannot be divorced from social content and context. Claims presented as rights are claims that are often, perhaps usually, presented as having a special kind of importance, urgency, universality or endorsement that makes them more than disparate or simply subjective demands. Their success is dependent on such endorsement - by a government or a legal system that has power to grant and protect such rights, by a tradition or institution whose authority is accepted in those circles that recognise these claims as rights, by widespread social sentiment, regionally, nationally or internationally. Claims, whether presented as rights or not, conflict. So do the traditions, institutions and authorities that endorse the claim as a right. They conflict both with each other and, often, in their internal structure, implications and working out. It is a feature of rights propaganda, for this very reason, to emphasise and elevate one right at a time or seriatim, but not to examine their relationship to each other too closely. Bringing rights- claims in relation with each other at the practical level is the distinctive and central task of law - a task the importance of which is matched only by its complexity. It is a task that requires attention to the plurality of interests and of endorsed rights found in any society and in any situation of conflict. It requires care in gauging the practical effect and social and moral impact of decisions, not only on the parties directly involved. It requires dedication to the rational and impartial examination of problems and the learning and awareness that come only from considering systematised experience over time and over a wide range of social situations and demands. Justice consists not in the strident proclamation of rights, but in considering carefully how to give every man, woman and child his, her or its due. Whatever the professional deformations of the lawyer, those of the moral philosopher, the politician and the demagogue are in this respect infinitely greater. When the lawyer, or anyone else, out of shallow moral and political engagement, political careerism or a simple desire to be loved, consistently abandons his or her expertise for the crudity and the demagoguery of less intellectual life, the social consequences can be disastrous. The concept of human rights is no longer tied to belief in God or Natural Law in its classical sense. But it still seeks or claims a form of

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