The subjects of human rights : human individuals and the human community

Abstract

The recognition of the human rights of the individual should be complemented by the recognition of rights belonging to humanity as a whole. Human rights should not continue to be regarded as constituting a binary relation between an individual and the State, but as necessarily a ternary relation between the individual, the State and Humanity as a whole. The need to recognise humanity as a whole as a subject of human rights derives its relevance from the problems of developing human rights enforcement in the Mediterranean region, partly due to Arab-Muslim objections that the current legal treatment of human rights is based on a concept of man as an atomistic individual. Humanity as a whole would have a special type of legal personality; similar to that enjoyed by the type of human association that Roman law termed a universitas. The implications of this argument are illustrated by the paradigm case of property, where the human right to private property would carry with it the correlative duty not to trespass against the Common Heritage of Mankind. This notion that humanity as a whole is a subject of human rights could be further generalised to provide a rational foundation for the rights of future generations and environmental rights. The key issue of representation has to be tackled, since some individual or grouping (such as the UN General Assembly) must be considered as the representative of mankind as a whole. The philosophical foundations of this thesis rest on the claim that humans are part of an organically linked whole, including both ancestors and successors. This is both a biological and a cultural reality. Its neglect has led to such bad consequences as the disintegration of the most fundamental values of non-Western cultures under the pressure of imposed Western legal ideas, which overemphasise the pursuit of individual interests. This conceptual framework may assist in the construction of a platform for the Euro-Mediterranean dialogue on human rights envisaged in Barcelona.