In Friday's Boston Globe, the director of Amnesty International's 'Demand Dignity' campaign spells out an approach to human rights campaigning that is based on recognizing the positive (social and economic) rights as well as the negative (civil and political) rights. He says:
People are accustomed to thinking of human rights violations as abuses committed by repressive regimes - torture, arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, enforced "disappearances," political assassination, and the like.
But the international human rights framework is much broader. Sixty years ago, following the brutality of World War II when the Nazis denied Jews, Roma, gays, and others their very right to exist, the response of the international community was unequivocal - human rights had to be based on the principle of inclusion. That is, everyone is entitled to the same set of rights by virtue of being human. These include the right to freedom from torture and arbitrary imprisonment, and no less importantly, the right to adequate food and shelter, basic healthcare, education and employment. In short, the right to live a life of dignity.
A little while back Conor Foley, referring to a similar view expressed by Kate Allen, put forward reasons for doubting the effectiveness of this (positive-as-well-as-negative rights) approach. I will not challenge his reasons directly: they concern the practical difficulties involved in securing people's social and economic rights and in identifying those responsible where there are failures in this regard. But I think there is a tension in Conor's argument about the status of the positive rights.
For, on the one hand, he appears to accept that positive human rights (to subsistence, health care, etc) can just as validly be regarded as rights as can the negative rights: though they may require for their realization active provision by governments, so too, Conor says, does the protection of negative rights. (See also, in this connection, these two posts of my own.) But, on the other hand, he then sets out several practical difficulties involved in securing their implementation - one of these: just who has the obligation to secure them? - and concludes that in the light of those difficulties Amnesty should 'just stick to what it is good at'.
The structure of Conor's argument, therefore, seems to be that: (a) positive rights are indeed rights; but (b) difficulties of implementation make them less apt for Amnesty's attention and campaigning than negative rights, since the positive rights are more like ideals in a development programme than they are like firm individual or group entitlements. The problem here is that this is what critics of positive rights say: that these are aspirations rather than rights strictly speaking; something to aim for, to achieve if and where we can, but not hard claims that can be pressed by all human beings on the communities to which they belong and the relevant institutions of national and international governance.
I think there is a choice to be made between Conor's (a) and his (b). If positive rights are indeed rights and not merely long-range ideals, then whatever the practical difficulties, I don't see how Amnesty International can be faulted for making them an object of attention and campaigning - as well as the negative, political and civil rights, not instead of those. By treating the positive rights as fundamental human rights, we say that they are claims that demand the most urgent moral and political, and consequently campaigning, attention. Or else they are desirable objectives, no more. It is then unfortunate if people are suffering from malnutrition, starvation or want of adequate health care, but they do not have a moral claim, as of right, against their governments or the aid agencies or the international community or the rest of humankind.
It's surely better to say - with Amnesty and with Conor's (a) - that they do have such a moral claim.