Most people know that they have certain basic rights – that they are born free and equal, that nobody can be forced to do something against their will and that all humans deserve to live with dignity. These are the foundations of human rights, enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and embodied in international treaties.
These rights are indivisible, which means that they cannot be ranked or positioned in a hierarchy. This is because the enjoyment of one right inevitably depends, at least in part, on the enjoyment of other rights – for example, a woman’s right to life might be impossible without the state being able to ensure that she has enough to eat, or a man’s right to freedom from torture might not be possible unless the state also has an adequate standard of living for all its citizens.
It is also important to realise that the principles of human rights are not necessarily easy to apply in practice, and that a realisation of human rights involves a complex balance between competing interests. This is why the Council has a number of expert thematic and country mandates.
Despite the fact that many governments, political parties or candidates and civil society actors profess to be committed to human rights, this is not always the case. This is sometimes due to an impoverished understanding of what human rights standards require; at other times it may be a deliberate abuse of the concept of human rights in order to appear progressive.