2 views on rights

Daniel Hannan, The new Road to Serfdom, 2010, pp. 146-148.

The EU differs from all treaty organizations in that its law penetrates into the very fabric of national life by imposing obligations on individuals. The European treaties do not simply bind their signatories as states; they create a superior legal order, binding on individuals, and directly enforceable by national courts, with or without implementing legislation by the national legislatures. This is why the EU's power is so awesome. Once the new world order was proclaimed, the EU. model was copied by other international bodies, and soon a host of international organizations had cropped up that claimed the right to regulate the most intimate details of people's lives.

The main vehicle for this internationalization of law has been the doctrine of "universal human rights." In the name of statements of desirable general principles, international organizations have been created that claim the right to interpret and even to enforce those principles as they see fit. People often react favorably when they hear that a new body has been created to protect human rights. What they perhaps do not realize is that ordinary people do not get any new rights as a result. What happens is that those working in the new institutions get to determine what our rights are. We may disagree with them, but we can do nothing about it, as no one elects them.

The European heads of state and government signed the European Charter of Fundamental Rights at the Nice summit in 2000. Initially, it had no legal base, since the European Constitution that would have authorized it was rejected in referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005. But the EU went ahead anyway and created a new Human Rights Agency in Vienna, which was belatedly regularized when the Constitution came into effect in December 2009.

The Agency's remit is huge: the Charter of Fundamental Rights contains rules on everything-on the right to life, on liberty, on the right to a fair trial, and on the right to a family. There are rules on data protection, consumer protection, environmental protection, freedom of thought, freedom of religion. There is "the freedom of the arts" and "the right to education." Asylum policy, multiculturalism, social security, health care, the right to vote-you name it, the EU has a policy on it. There is even a "right to good administration"­ which is pretty rich, coming from Brussels.

The EU is only one international body that claims the right to make and enforce laws. The Council of Europe, a pan-European organization that includes Russia, Ukraine, and other former Soviet republics, is home to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Although separate from the EU, this organization has become the de facto Supreme Court for the whole of Europe. People with a grievance can pursue cases against their own national courts and national legislatures and obtain rulings from the ECHR made by judges who have nothing to do with their country; who do not have to bear the consequences of their own decisions; and who, in some cases, worked for the judiciary under communism.

The very existence of international courts like the ECHR violates the principle of territorial jurisdiction. According to this ancient doctrine, on which the rule of law is based, the rulings of judges are themselves embedded in the overall institutions of a state. They are governed by carefully drafted laws, and the national legislature and local authorities monitor the effect of these laws on society. So if a law gives rise to a judicial ruling whose effects are deemed unnecessarily expensive to society and its taxpayers, or detrimental in any other way, then the law can be changed. However, once international courts and international conventions become involved, this key link between national policy, the law-making process, and law enforcement is broken.

It was on these doctrines, and on this growing corpus of precedent, that the International Criminal Court was established, with the power to prosecute individuals, including heads of state and government, directly.
 Human Rights Are More Important Than Property Rights, Paul L. Poirot, Freeman Editor, 1956–1987

"It is not the right of property which is protected, but the right to property. Property, per se, has no rights; but the individual —the man— has three great rights, equally sacred from arbitrary interference: the right to his life, the right to his liberty, the right to his property.... The three rights are so bound together as to be essentially one right. To give a man his life but deny him his liberty, is to take from him all that makes his life worth living. To give him his liberty but take from him the property which is the fruit and badge of his liberty, is to still leave him a slave." —U.S. Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland

Tricky phrases with favorable meanings and emotional appeal are being used today to imply a distinction between property rights and human rights.

By implication, there are two sets of rights—one belonging to human beings and the other to property. Since human beings are more important, it is natural for the unwary to react in favor of human rights.

Actually, there is no such distinction between property rights and human rights. The term property has no significance except as it applies to something owned by someone. Property itself has neither rights nor value, except as human interests are involved. There are no rights but human rights, and what are spoken of as property rights are only the human rights of individuals to property.

What are the property rights thus disparaged by being set apart from human rights? They are among the most ancient and basic of human rights, and among the most essential to freedom and progress. They are the privileges of private ownership which give meaning to the right to the product of one’s labor—privileges which men have always regarded instinctively as belonging to them almost as intimately and inseparably as their own bodies. Unless people can feel secure in their ability to retain the fruits of their labor, there is little incentive to save and expand the fund of capital—the tools and equipment for production and for better living.

The Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution recognizes no distinction between property rights and other human rights. The ban against unreasonable search and seizure covers “persons, houses, papers, and effects,” without discrimination. No person may, without due process of law, be deprived of “life, liberty or property”; all are equally inviolable. The right to trial by jury is assured in criminal and civil cases alike. Excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual punishments are grouped in a single prohibition. The Founding Fathers realized that a man or woman without property rights—without the right to the product of his own labor—is not a free man.

These constitutional rights all have two characteristics in common. First, they apply equally to all persons. Second, they are, without exception, guarantees of freedom or immunity from governmental interference. They are not assertions of claims against others, individually or collectively. They merely say, in effect, that there are certain human liberties, including some pertaining to property, which are essential to free citizens and upon which the State shall not infringe.
Now what about the so-called human rights that are represented as superior to property rights? What about the “right” to a job, the “right” to a standard of living, the “right” to a minimum wage or a maximum work week, the right to a “fair” price, the “right to bargain collectively, the “right” to security against the adversities and hazards of life, such as old age and disability?

The framers of the Constitution would have been astonished to hear these things spoken of as rights. They are not immunities from governmental compulsion; on the contrary, they are demands for new forms of governmental compulsion. They are not claims to the product of one’s own labor; they are, in some if not in most cases, claims to the products of other people’s labor.

These “human rights” are indeed different from property rights, for they rest on a denial of the basic concept of property rights. They are not freedoms or immunities assured to all persons alike. They are special privileges conferred upon some persons at the expense of others. The real distinction is not between property rights and human rights, but between equality of protection between governmental compulsion on the one hand and demands for the exercise of such compulsion for the benefit of favored groups on the other.

See: The New Road to Serfdom
See: The Lisbon Treaty
And see: Paul L. Poirot