Basic of human rights jurisprudence-A synoptic view

Human rights are those fundamental rights to which every human being living in any part of the world is entitled to be virtue of having been born as human being. Human Rights constitute a genus to which humanitarian law is a species.  The former relates to the basic rights of all human being everywhere, at all times, and the latter relates to the rights of particular categories of human beings, such as the sick, the wounded, prisoners of wars during armed conflicts and hostility.  In common parlance, human rights may be described as rights which are inherent in the people by virtue of their being human beings, the rights that are required for the full and complete development of human personality.

Human rights are based on identical fundamental conceptions.  The most fundamental is the idea of human rights as presupposition of a human life worth living, in whatever minimal sense.  No life can be worthwhile without enforceable guarantees, against the state and others to physical integrity, freedom of thought and action and minimal means of subsistence.  A human life worth living in a minimal sense presupposes protection of life in normal circumstances, a decent amount of personal property and the coercive force of law of contract. Of course, human rights also prohibit torture and humiliating treatment.

What is true is that human rights are the statements of basic needs or interests.  To be true, needs constitute one of the founding elements of human rights.  In general terms it has been maintained that by resorting to needs, one accept that the anthropological base of human right is to be found within them, in such a way that to recognize, exercise and protect a basic right means that in the end one hopes to satisfy a series of needs, understood  as claims which are considered essential for the development of a dignified life.

The first problem that we need to tackle in understanding the very basis of human rights jurisprudence is to clarify the very notion of basic human needs. Truly speaking, need is a situation that is always predicted in a person and is inescapable for the person.  Thomson rightly defines the basic characteristic of basic need  as avoidance. It refers to those situations that deprive someone of something that is basic or essential and consequently, we relate directly to the notion of injury, deprivation or serious harm to a person, which obviously can have a contextual determination. It is clear that this idea calls for one to transcend the conception of harm in terms of deprivation or frustration of the living we want, as well as meta physical parameter.  These situations in which a person finds him/herself and those from which they cannot escape are closely related or have direct repercussions on the quality of human life and have a basic characteristic that enables us to talk of a need: the harm will remain at exactly the same level, expect in the case where the situation is fulfilled or carried out ant there is not alternative possibility of getting out of it. Therefore, as Thomson and Galtung, among others, point out, it is not a question of transient set-back, problems or impairments, but of a permanent degeneration in the quality of human life which will remain so long as satisfaction is not reached.

It is imperative to point out that needs are ofter confused with the means of satisfying them. The existence of a need is a separate or different issue from the satisfaction of that need: the first step consists of proving that a need exists. The second step consists of raising the question of if this need should be satisfied or not.  There is no necessary casual relationship between one step and another.  The needs basically provide up with arguments for supporting reasons which seem better or stronger than others, when we want to satisfy these needs. If needs give rise to good reason that are enough to require satisfaction and on the other hand, if the claim for basic human needs to be satisfied is good enough reason for them to be recognized as rights, then this order of questions links our study with the field of practical reasoning, which, in turn, is located within the framework in which the problem of the foundation of human rights must be situated.