As quoted in today's Times, Maryam Namazie says:
Rights are for individuals, not for religions or beliefs.This is only half true. A right is a moral claim or entitlement, entailing liberties, obligations and prohibitions that are relevant to moral actors and beneficiaries. As such a right cannot be held by a belief or a set of beliefs. It can be held only by the kind of entity able to claim it on their own behalf (as with persons) or, at least, have it claimed for them (as with infants or animals) by others putatively acting in their interests. But this is not to say that all rights belong to individuals.
Groups may also have rights, otherwise we should not be able to speak meaningfully of nations having the right to self-determination. Some seemingly collective rights may, of course, be reducible to the rights of the individuals who make up the collective in question. Thus the right of a religious group to practice its religion can be broken down into the right of all the individuals whose religion it is to freedom of worship. But not all collective rights are of this kind. The right of nations to self-determination is a case in point. The right of the Palestinians to a state of their own and the right of the Jews to a state of their own includes an entitlement to some territory; but this is, irreducibly, a group right. Individual Israelis and Palestinians don't each have a right to a 'bit of a state' that then gets aggregated with all the other rights to other 'bits of a state' into one overall right to a whole state (and territory). Equally, an organization can have certain rights - property rights, for example - which the members of the organization only benefit from while, and in so far as, they remain members of it.
The wider substantive point Namazie is making through her quoted statement is valid, however. Group rights, where they exist, cannot cancel or override fundamental human rights, which are, these, for individuals. That is the point of specifying them as human rights and fundamental. They protect every person irrespective of the group or culture to which he or she belongs. (Via Mick.)