The Rights Human Deserve

When brainstorming about human right, some may think that it is the most important part of democracy; some may think that it is the main obstacle China faced in raising its HDI. Social activists hold endless riots to protest for human right, but I question that what rights does human deserve? So far, the concept of human right is highly problematic. Only when the term is clearly defined, we can make right efforts to improve the situation and work effectively, or many of the actions would be pointless.

The basic and most commonly approved part of human right is equality. People deserve to be treated as equal lives regardless of race, gender, status, religious belief or anything else. This gain people’s consensus approval because we have realised the disorganisation and instability that inequality brings for human society, and how devastating they are for development. For example, the initiation of World War II was Hitler’s ‘Ethnic Cleansing’. And the cause of the American Civil War is African slavery. It is clear that equality is an important component of human right. To achieve this, governments need to avoid discrimination in policy making. Fortunately, we already see some improvement in this situation. Singapore has allowed Malay soldier entrance some years ago. In addition, recently, the US army allowed homosexuals to claim their orientation when entering army.

On the other hand, some issues on human right are much more controversial than equality. A typical example is freedom of expression. It is undoubtedly that people deserve freedom of expression, but the question is the freedom should be to what extent. It has caused anger all over the world, including China itself, that China government has arrested Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Prize winner. This led a new turn of condemnation on China’s human right status. The Chinese government has long censored remarks that criticise the government. Many say that it is not in line with human right principle, because there is no reason to ban the criticisms if the government is not good enough to receive praises. I agree with this point, but I also believe that personal attacks should not be made under any circumstances, because they are certainly insults of other’s right.

Bring out the issue of interference of rights, it comes many problems. It is also difficult to clearly differentiate human right to some other concepts like obligation or willingness. It is also difficult to address these issues because even in the same country, different groups or even individuals are in different level of need for human right. So together, definition of human right is extremely unclear and subjective due to the vast difference between people. Thus the situation may only experience dramatic improvement when social development can reach a relatively high level and people in the region enjoy a generally high standard of living.