What exactly is the debate between individual vs collective human rights? Is it a debate on whether collective rights can be individual rights? If so, what are the reasons for and against this?
Here are my notes:
Individual human rights and collective human rights are both capable of being described and identified, and do co-exist because it is almost universally agreed that the individuals of a group certainly possess the same human rights as other persons, although the group to which they belong may not possess the same rights as other groups. In Australia, the land rights, voting rights, and citizenship rights of the original inhabitants, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) peoples took a long time to be recognised. On the other hand, in New Zealand, the original inhabitants, the Maoris, had many of their rights as a group recognised much earlier in the Treaty of Waitangi.
All individual rights can be group rights. It is simply a matter of restating individual rights as a right which can be held by an identifiable group of people. All collective rights are not necessarily individual rights. For example, ‘all Rohingya refugees have the right to live in Myanmar.
In the circumstances that individual rights CANNOT be group rights, would be if the individual right is CHANGED and REPLACED into a group right, as that would then exclude individuals who are not part of the included group.
A taste of the two points of view is in the following quotation:
Here are my notes:
Individual human rights and collective human rights are both capable of being described and identified, and do co-exist because it is almost universally agreed that the individuals of a group certainly possess the same human rights as other persons, although the group to which they belong may not possess the same rights as other groups. In Australia, the land rights, voting rights, and citizenship rights of the original inhabitants, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) peoples took a long time to be recognised. On the other hand, in New Zealand, the original inhabitants, the Maoris, had many of their rights as a group recognised much earlier in the Treaty of Waitangi.
All individual rights can be group rights. It is simply a matter of restating individual rights as a right which can be held by an identifiable group of people. All collective rights are not necessarily individual rights. For example, ‘all Rohingya refugees have the right to live in Myanmar.
In the circumstances that individual rights CANNOT be group rights, would be if the individual right is CHANGED and REPLACED into a group right, as that would then exclude individuals who are not part of the included group.
A taste of the two points of view is in the following quotation:
Can a right borne by a group be a human right? For some analysts, the answer is obviously,” No”. They argue that human rights are the rights of human beings and, self-evidently, each human being is an individual being. Groups may have rights of some sort, but whatever those rights might be, they cannot be human rights. Human rights must be borne by human individuals.
Other analysts, unimpressed by that simple logic, insisted human rights can take collective as well as individual forms. They argue that much of what is fundamentally important to human beings relates to “goods” and “bads” that people experience collectively rather than individually. If we insisted human rights must be rights that people can hold only as independent individuals, our conception of human rights will not match the social reality of the human condition.
It's probably right there in front of me but I am just really confused on what is being argued...
