Fundamental Rights Part Two: An Overview

by William Wright

What's special about fundamental rights?

NOTE: For the purposes of this article "fundamental rights" means human rights and fundamental freedoms.

Some of your fundamental rights include:

The right to life
The right to liberty
The right to security of the person
The right to an unmolested pursuit of a trade or occupation
The right to property
The right, upon reaching the age of majority, to enter into contract

These rights are common to everyone in a system of law that recognizes fundamental rights. This means that if you have these rights, everyone else has the duty to respect them, and vice versa. In common law systems, these rights are recognized and will be enforced on your behalf by the state, but are not granted to you by the state.

What makes fundamental rights special is that they belong to you. These rights belong to you because you belong to you. Your life, your liberty, your person, your skills, your creations, etc. were not created by the state, so the state has no claim to them without your consent or without use of force.

This brings us to the last right in the above list: the right to contract. The right to contract is actually the power to acquire other rights – along with their accompanying duties. The use of this power is an expression of your free will and, used unwisely, can leave you wondering how others gained authority over what ordinarily belongs to you.

Contracting away your fundamental rights

In a system of law that recognizes fundamental rights, consent is required to take away what belongs to another. Consent is the equivalent of authorization. Authorization isn't always given in the form of signing on the dotted line:

Harming another who has the right to security of the person authorizes the state to take action on behalf of the injured party against the injuring party
Stealing from another who has the right to property authorizes the state to take action on behalf of the deprived party against the thieving party
Not saying 'no' can be the equivalent of saying 'yes' and bind you to undesirable duties

These are just a few of the ways you can give away your authority over you. Your legal life is, in a sense, like a powerful sports car; your skill in managing it will determine the extent to which it remains under your control.

Fundamental Rights Part One: Claiming What's Yours

Note: This article may be published, provided there is a link back to the original article on this site.

The Nature Of Your Person