19) What are Universal Rights?

We stand today at the threshold of a great event both in the life of the UN, and in the life of mankind.

With these words, Eleanor Roosevelt presented the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the United Nations. It was 1948 and UN member states, determined to prevent a repeat of the horrors of World War Two, were filled with idealism and aspiration.

The Universal Declaration provides a setting of common standard for legal achievement, and we could consider it a template against which every system of law will be measured. Finally, its words and sentiments have become the lingua franca of how people should be treated.

At the same time the concept of human rights is continually evolving through countries worldwide recognizing and codifying new human rights or clarifying the content of existing standards.

The rights which are laid down in law are called legal rights. Is a human a living thing recognized by law? Or is it rather to be a living thing belonging to the human race?

Rights arising out of general principles of fairness and justice are called moral rights. While human rights are claims recognized by states according to a moral or philosophical approach, moral rights are necessary to human dignity.

Thus, a moral right asserts that even if it does not have the sanction of the state, it is a right because it is now accepted by human civilization as a basic condition that every human being is entitled to expect. The implementation of human rights can go well beyond legislation. So even if they can and often do inspire legislation, it is a further fact that rather that for human rights to be legal, or pro-legal, ideally their legality—their status as enacted law—should not be their constitutive justification.

Without going into abstract philosophical debates, it would probably be universally agreed that what we normally call human rights are the minimum agreed standards defining our humanity at this point in history.

Human rights encompass a whole set of values, and provide a template against which we should measure our design and ourselves. Are human rights created or discovered?

And at this point you may ask why does it matter? Is this just a game that activist and politicians and philosophers play? The answer is that it matters quite a lot. Because if we believe in sustainability and we get the answer wrong on human rights, we may end up building cities that collapse.

The struggle for rights seeks state recognition but pursues it in society and culture to further realize it in practice. The greatest hope for humanity lies not in condemning human-rights abuses, but in making such abuses obsolete.

The idea that the struggle for human rights is equivalent to street protests is also very limiting. Because although protests can be a powerful public expression of a desire for change, on their own they don’t actually create change—at least not change that is fundamental.

In fact, most of the rights that we enjoy today in this country—as women, as minorities, as workers, as people of different sexual orientations, and as citizens concerned with the environment, were not handed to us. They were won by long struggles for change.

Let’s learn more about where design solutions have worked and how we can make change more powerful, just like we do with other systems and technologies that are constantly being refined to better meet human needs. Architecture provides a pretty harrowing link between what’s happening to our environment and what’s happening to our human rights.