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Human Rights: Rules and Theory

Criticisms of human rights, law and morality and law and justice

  • 3 things to know
  • A2 Units 3 and 4

Overview

Criticism known as rights inflation, relationship between law and morality in human rights law and human rights law departing from a widely held moral view.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

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Key term

How does the Hart and Devlin debate bear on human rights law?

Evaluation

Summarise the criticism that human rights law is a charter for the undeserving.

Evaluation

How is the charter for the undeserving criticism answered?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    Summarise the criticism that human rights law is a charter for the undeserving.

    Model answer

    Critics say the Act is most visibly used by prisoners, terrorist suspects and those resisting deportation, which drains public support for the protections generally.

  2. 2

    How is the charter for the undeserving criticism answered?

    Model answer

    Protections are only ever tested at the margins by unpopular claimants, and the same rules are relied on by bereaved families, patients and victims of crime.

  3. 3

    What is the criticism known as rights inflation?

    Model answer

    Critics argue that interpretation has stretched the Convention into areas its drafters never contemplated, so that ordinary disputes about policy are recast as questions of fundamental rights.

  4. 4

    Give the argument in favour of the living instrument approach to interpretation.

    Model answer

    A treaty written in 1950 could not anticipate modern surveillance technology or changed social attitudes, and a frozen reading would leave the Convention unable to address contemporary abuses.

  5. 5

    Why are human rights said to be culturally specific?

    Model answer

    Critics say the Convention embodies Western liberal individualism, so its claim to universality overlooks societies that give greater weight to community, family or religious obligation.

  6. 6

    How does the margin of appreciation answer the charge of cultural specificity?

    Model answer

    It allows each state a measure of discretion in how it secures a qualified right, so national traditions and moral standards can be accommodated within a shared minimum.

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