WE ARE EUROPE - When Values Became Rights

 

By RM Westerink

From “We Value” to “I Have a Right”

Our European value package has a protective quality. It gives individuals room to live their own lives while protecting the society in which different individuals must live together. But valuing something and being protected by it are not the same. What happens when a ruler takes freedom away, the law treats a group as inferior, or a majority decides that somebody else's difference is no longer acceptable?

“We value freedom” becomes “I have a right to be free.”

That change matters. A value describes what we think important. A right gives the individual a claim that should survive disagreement, unpopularity and changes of government.

Rights Began with Boundaries

There is no single starting point for human rights. Ideas about justice, dignity, duties and limits on rulers appear across civilizations and traditions. In Europe, rights were long particular rather than universal: citizens rather than foreigners, nobles rather than peasants, believers rather than heretics, property owners rather than workers, men rather than women.

Yet the idea that power could have boundaries kept developing. Magna Carta in 1215 was not a declaration of universal rights, but it contributed to a longer proposition that even a king could be constrained by law. Seventeenth-century English conflicts pushed further, culminating in the Bill of Rights of 1689.

Enlightenment thinkers then asked whether rights came from rulers at all. Natural-rights theories treated individuals as possessing claims by virtue of being human, with government legitimate partly because it protected them. The American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789 gave these ideas powerful political expression - while leaving enormous exclusions intact.

The Difficult Question: Who Counts?

Societies proclaiming liberty maintained slavery. Women lacked political rights. Voting was often restricted by property. Religious minorities faced discrimination and colonial subjects were governed without freedoms proclaimed in European capitals. The contradiction produced a question that repeatedly widened the protected circle: if freedom and equality are rights, why do they belong to me but not to you?

Religious minorities claimed conscience; people without property demanded participation; abolitionists challenged slavery; workers claimed political and social rights; women claimed equality and the vote; racial and ethnic minorities challenged legal discrimination. Rights expanded not smoothly, but often because people outside the protected circle insisted that proclaimed principles apply to them too.

Industrial society also widened the meaning of freedom. Formal liberty mattered, but how free is somebody without education, income when unable to work, or protection against destitution? Social security, work, education and an adequate standard of living entered the rights tradition. Our European combination of freedom and collective responsibility appears again.

Then Europe Showed What Could Still Happen

By the early twentieth century Europe possessed constitutional governments, sophisticated political thought and declarations of rights. None prevented fascism, Nazism or the Holocaust. Modern states showed how quickly citizenship, property, freedom and life itself could be removed once some people were placed outside legal protection.

The Second World War therefore sharpened the question. If rights exist only because a state grants them, what protects the individual when the state becomes the violator? After 1945 the answer increasingly took universal form: some rights belong to us because we are human, not because a particular government chooses to grant them.

The World Tries to Write Them Down

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948 as a common standard for all peoples and nations.[1] It would be wrong to tell this as European ideas simply conquering the world. The drafting process deliberately brought together different legal, political, religious and cultural traditions. Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the commission, alongside central contributions from P. C. Chang of China, Charles Malik of Lebanon, René Cassin of France, John Humphrey of Canada, Hernán Santa Cruz of Chile and others. More than 50 UN member states participated in the final process.[1][3]

The disagreements were real, which makes the result more significant. Indian delegate Hansa Mehta is widely credited with helping change the opening language from 'all men' to 'all human beings'. No state voted against adoption, although eight abstained.[1]

Do We Recognize Our Values?

We did not derive our ten-value package from the UDHR. That makes comparison useful. Put the two beside one another and the correspondence is striking:

Our European value	Rights language we recognize in the UDHR
Human dignity	Equal dignity and rights; protection of the person
Live our own lives	Liberty, privacy, movement, thought, conscience, religion, expression and association
Equal say	Participation in government; authority based on the will of the people
Equal before law	Non-discrimination and equal protection
Protection from arbitrary power	Protection against arbitrary arrest/detention; fair hearing and remedy
Help when needed	Social security, work, education and adequate living standards
Free to be different	Freedom of belief, opinion and association plus non-discrimination
Honesty and trust	Not a standalone right; supported by freedoms of information, opinion and accountable public order
Rules, dialogue, compromise	Legal remedies, independent hearings, democratic participation and social order
REQUIRE peaceful resolution	The Declaration links dignity and equal rights with freedom, justice and peace

This does not make the UDHR a European document. It shows that much of what Europeans came to value belongs to a wider human-rights tradition. Europe does not own these principles. But expressing them as rights changes their force.

When a Value Becomes a Claim

If I value freedom of religion, I tell you what I believe. If I say you have a right to freedom of religion, your freedom should not depend on whether I approve of your religion. 'We value equality' is an aspiration; 'all are equal before the law' is a standard against which treatment can be judged. 'We should help' is a moral preference; social rights make protection against destitution less dependent on charity or luck.

Values tell us what matters. Rights give the individual a claim to protection.

The UDHR also rejects unlimited license. Article 29 recognizes duties to the community and permits lawful limits necessary to respect others' rights and the general welfare of a democratic society; Article 30 prevents the Declaration from being used to destroy the rights it contains.[2] Freedom is protected inside a society of equally free people.

A Declaration Is Not Yet Protection

The Declaration did not create a worldwide court through which every individual could enforce every right. Later covenants and conventions converted many principles into treaty obligations and developed more specific protections.[4][5] But for our exploration the essential transition is already visible: the person no longer says only, 'my society ought to value this.' The person can say, 'this is my right.'

Rights also give us a boundary for looking outward. Another society may simply be different. But when power intrudes upon rights we regard as belonging to the person, difference can become something we judge wrong. And when outside power can reach into our own protected space, wrong can become threat. That is where our values go to work next.

References

[1] United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights - History of the Declaration.

[2] United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

[3] United Nations, Drafters of the Declaration.

[4] United Nations, The Foundation of International Human Rights Law.

[5] United Nations, Eleanor Roosevelt in the UN Chronicle (1946-1949): On the Making of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.