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Sources of Human Rights

Positivism: The Authority of the State The assault upon natural law intensified during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. John Stuart Mill claimed that rights are founded on utility. Karl von Savigny in Germany, and Sir Henry Maine in England, claimed that rights are a function of cultural variables. However, the most serious attack on natural law came from a doctrine called legal positivism. This philosophy came to dominate legal theory during most of the nineteenth century and commands considerable allegiance in the twentieth. [End Page 208] Classical positivist philosophers deny an a priori source of rights and assume that all authority stems from what the state and officials have prescribed. This approach rejects any attempt to discern and articulate an idea of law transcending the empirical realities of existing legal systems. Under positivist theory, the source of human rights is found only in the enactments of a system of law with sanctions attached to it. Views on what the law "ought" to be have no place in law and are cognitively worthless. The theme that haunts positivist exponents is the need to distinguish with maximum clarity law as it is from law as it ought to be, and they condemned natural law thinkers because they had blurred this vital distinction. In its essence, positivism negates the moral philosophic basis of human rights. 17 By divorcing a legal system from the ethical and moral foundations of society, positive law encourages the belief that the law must be obeyed, no matter how immoral it may be, or however it disregards the world of the individual. The anti-Semitic edicts of the Nazis, although abhorrent to moral law, were obeyed as positive law. The same is true of the immoral apartheid practices that prevailed in South Africa for many years. The fact that positivist philosophy has been used to justify obedience to iniquitous laws has been a central focus for much of the modern criticism of that doctrine. Critics of positivism maintain that unjust laws not only lack a capacity to demand fidelity, but also do not deserve the name of law because they lack internal morality. Even granting the validity of the criticism, the positivist contribution can still be significant. If the state's processes can be brought to bear in the protection of human rights, it becomes easier to focus upon the specific implementation that is necessary for the protection of particular rights. Indeed, positivist thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Austin were often in the vanguard of those who sought to bring about reform in the law. Always under human control, a positivist system also offers flexibility to meet changing needs. The methodology of the positivist jurists in the technical building of legal conceptions is also pragmatically useful in developing a system of rights in international law. For example, the UN human rights treaties, being rules developed by the sovereign states themselves and then made part of a system of international law, reflect a positive set of rights. While many states may differ on the theoretical basis of these rules, the rules provide a legal grounding for human rights protection. On the other hand, in theory, positivism tends to undermine an international basis for human rights [End Page 209] because of the emphasis positivists place on the supremacy of national sovereignty without accepting the restraining influence of an inherent right above the state. Under this view, rules of international law are not law but merely rules of positive morality set or imposed by opinion.

Furthermore, by emphasizing the role of the nation state as the source of law, the positivist approach produces the view that the individual has no status in international law. Marxism: Man as a Specie Being Marxist theory, like natural law, is also concerned with the nature of human beings. However, in Marxism, the view of men and women is not one of autonomous individuals with rights developed from either a divine or inherent nature, but of men and women as "specie beings." 18 While Marxism fell along with the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, it was a dominant philosophy in much of the world for many years; in variant forms, Marxism has residual influence, particularly in assigning values to social and economic rights. Marx regarded the law of nature approach to human rights as idealistic and ahistorical. He saw nothing natural or inalienable about human rights. In a society in which capitalists monopolize the means of production, Marx regarded the notion of individual rights as a bourgeois illusion. Concepts such as law, justice, morality, democracy, freedom, etc., were considered historical categories, whose content was determined by the material conditions and the social circumstances of a people. As the conditions of life change, so the content of notions and ideas may change. Marxism sees a person's essence as the potential to use one's abilities to the fullest and to satisfy one's needs. 19 In capitalist society, production is controlled by a few. Consequently, such a society cannot satisfy those individual needs. An actualization of potential is contingent on the return of men and women to themselves as social beings, which occurs in a communist society devoid of class conflict. However, until that stage is reached, the state is a social collectivity and is the vehicle for the transformation of society. Such a conceptualization of the nature of society precludes the existence of individual rights rooted in the state of nature that are prior to the state. The only rights are those granted by the state, and their exercise is contingent on the fulfillment of obligations to society and to the state. The Marxist system of rights has often been referred to as "parental," with the authoritarian political body providing the sole guidance in value choice. The creation of such a "specie being" is a type of paternalism that not only ignores transcendental reason, but negates individuality. 20 In practice, pursuit of the prior claims of society as reflected in the interests of the Communist state has resulted in systematic suppression of individual civil and political rights. On an international level, Marxist theory proved incompatible with a functioning universal system of human rights. The prior claims of a Communist society do not recognize overruling by international norms. While Communist governments admitted a theoretical recognition of the competence of the international community to establish transnational norms, the application of those norms was held to be a matter of exclusive domestic jurisdiction. Communist states repeatedly asserted in international fora that their alleged abuse of human rights was a matter of exclusive domestic jurisdiction, not just as a matter of protecting sovereignty or avoiding the embarrassment of international examination, but the

assertions reflected communist theory of the unlimited role of the state to decide what is good for the specie beings. 21 Be that as it may, Marxism itself now ironically has become a past historical category.