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Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from infringement by
government A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state. In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government i ...
s, social organizations, and private individuals. They ensure one's entitlement to participate in the civil and political life of society and the state without discrimination or repression. Civil rights include the ensuring of peoples' physical and mental integrity, life, and safety; protection from discrimination on grounds such as sex, race, sexual orientation, national origin, color, age,
political affiliation A political party is an organization that coordinates candidates to compete in a particular country's elections. It is common for the members of a party to hold similar ideas about politics, and parties may promote specific ideological or pol ...
, ethnicity, social class, religion, and disability; and individual rights such as privacy and the freedom of thought, speech, religion, press, assembly, and movement. Political rights include
natural justice In English law, natural justice is technical terminology for the rule against bias (''nemo iudex in causa sua'') and the right to a fair hearing ('' audi alteram partem''). While the term ''natural justice'' is often retained as a general c ...
(procedural fairness) in law, such as the rights of the accused, including the right to a fair trial; due process; the right to seek redress or a legal remedy; and rights of participation in civil society and politics such as freedom of association, the right to assemble, the
right to petition The right to petition government for redress of grievances is the right to make a complaint to, or seek the assistance of, one's government, without fear of punishment or reprisals. In Europe, Article 44 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of ...
, the right of self-defense, and the right to vote. Civil and political rights form the original and main part of international human rights. They comprise the first portion of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (with
economic, social, and cultural rights Economic, social and cultural rights, (ESCR) are socio-economic human rights, such as the right to education, right to housing, right to an adequate standard of living, right to health, victims' rights and the right to science and culture. Econ ...
comprising the second portion). The theory of three generations of human rights considers this group of rights to be "first-generation rights", and the theory of negative and positive rights considers them to be generally negative rights.


History

The phrase "civil rights" is a translation of Latin ''jus civis'' (right of the citizen). Roman citizens could be either free (''libertas'') or servile (''servitus''), but they all had rights in law. After the Edict of Milan in 313, these rights included the freedom of religion; however, in 380, the Edict of Thessalonica required all subjects of the Roman Empire to profess Catholic Christianity.Fahlbusch, Erwin and Geoffrey William Bromiley, ''The encyclopedia of Christianity'', Volume 4, p. 703. Roman legal doctrine was lost during the Middle Ages, but claims of universal rights could still be made based on Christian doctrine. According to the leaders of Kett's Rebellion (1549), "all bond men may be made free, for God made all free with his precious blood-shedding." In the 17th century, English common law judge Sir Edward Coke revived the idea of rights based on citizenship by arguing that Englishmen had historically enjoyed such rights. The Parliament of England adopted the English Bill of Rights in 1689. It was one of the influences drawn on by George Mason and James Madison when drafting the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776. The Virginia declaration is the direct ancestor and model for the U.S. Bill of Rights (1789). The removal by legislation of a civil right constitutes a "civil disability". In early 19th century Britain, the phrase "civil rights" most commonly referred to the issue of such legal discrimination against Catholics. In the House of Commons support for civil rights was divided, with many politicians agreeing with the existing civil disabilities of Catholics. The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 restored their civil rights. In the United States, the term civil rights has been associated with the civil rights movement (1954-1968), which fought against racism.


Protection of rights

T. H. Marshall Thomas Humphrey Marshall (1893–1981) was an English sociologist who is best known for his essay " Citizenship and Social Class," a key work on citizenship that introduced the idea that full citizenship includes civil, political, and social ci ...
notes that civil rights were among the first to be recognized and codified, followed later by political rights and still later by social rights. In many countries, they are
constitutional right A constitutional right can be a prerogative or a duty, a power or a restraint of power, recognized and established by a sovereign state or union of states. Constitutional rights may be expressly stipulated in a national constitution, or they may ...
s and are included in a bill of rights or similar document. They are also defined in international human rights instruments, such as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Civil and political rights need not be codified to be protected. However, most democracies worldwide do have formal written guarantees of civil and political rights. Civil rights are considered to be natural rights.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Fathers of the United States, Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 18 ...
wrote in his ''
A Summary View of the Rights of British America ''A Summary View of the Rights of British America'' was a tract written by Thomas Jefferson in 1774, before the U.S. Declaration of Independence, in which he laid out for delegates to the First Continental Congress a set of grievances against Kin ...
'' that "a free people
laim Laim (Central Bavarian: ''Loam'') is a district of Munich, Germany, forming the 25th borough of the city. Inhabitants: c. 49.000 (2005) History Originally its own independent locality, Laim was in existence before Munich. It was first documente ...
their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate." The question of to whom civil and political rights apply is a subject of controversy. Although in many countries citizens have greater protections against infringement of rights than non-citizens, civil and political rights are generally considered to be universal rights that apply to all persons. According to political scientist Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr., analyzing the causes of and lack of protection from human rights abuses in the Global South should be focusing on the interactions of domestic and international factors—an important perspective that has usually been systematically neglected in the social science literature.


Other rights

Custom also plays a role. Implied or unenumerated rights are rights that courts may find to exist even though not expressly guaranteed by written law or custom; one example is the right to privacy in the
United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...
, and the Ninth Amendment explicitly shows that there are other rights that are also protected. The United States Declaration of Independence states that people have unalienable rights including "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". It is considered by some that the sole purpose of government is the protection of life, liberty and property. Some thinkers have argued that the concepts of self-ownership and cognitive liberty affirm rights to choose the food one eats, the medicine one takes, and the habit one indulges.


Social movements for civil rights

Civil rights guarantee equal protection under the law. When civil and political rights are not guaranteed to all as part of equal protection of laws, or when such guarantees exist on paper but are not respected in practice, opposition, legal action and even social unrest may ensue. Civil rights movements in the United States gathered steam by 1848 with such documents as the Declaration of Sentiment. Consciously modeled after the Declaration of Independence, the
Declaration of Rights and Sentiments The Declaration of Sentiments, also known as the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, is a document signed in 1848 by 68 women and 32 men—100 out of some 300 attendees at the first women's rights convention to be organized by women. Held in Sen ...
became the founding document of the American women's movement, and it was adopted at the Seneca Falls Convention, July 19 and 20, 1848. Worldwide, several political movements for equality before the law occurred between approximately 1950 and 1980. These movements had a legal and constitutional aspect, and resulted in much law-making at both national and international levels. They also had an activist side, particularly in situations where violations of rights were widespread. Movements with the proclaimed aim of securing observance of civil and political rights included: * the civil rights movement in the United States, where rights of black citizens had been violated; * the
Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association ) was an organisation that campaigned for civil rights in Northern Ireland during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Formed in Belfast on 9 April 1967,
, formed in 1967 following failures in this province of the
United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and ...
to respect the Roman Catholic minority's rights; and * movements in many Communist countries, such as the Prague Spring and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia and the uprisings in Hungary. Most civil rights movements relied on the technique of civil resistance, using nonviolent methods to achieve their aims. In some countries, struggles for civil rights were accompanied, or followed, by civil unrest and even armed rebellion. While civil rights movements over the last sixty years have resulted in an extension of civil and political rights, the process was long and tenuous in many countries, and many of these movements did not achieve or fully achieve their objectives.


Problems and analysis

Questions about civil and political rights have frequently emerged. For example, to what extent should the government intervene to protect individuals from infringement on their rights by other individuals, or from
corporation A corporation is an organization—usually a group of people or a company—authorized by the state to act as a single entity (a legal entity recognized by private and public law "born out of statute"; a legal person in legal context) and ...
s—e.g., in what way should employment discrimination in the private sector be dealt with? Political theory deals with civil and political rights. Robert Nozick and John Rawls expressed competing visions in Nozick's '' Anarchy, State, and Utopia'' and Rawls' '' A Theory of Justice''. Other influential authors in the area include Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, and Jean Edward Smith.


First-generation rights

First-generation rights, often called "blue" rights, deal essentially with liberty and participation in political life. They are fundamentally civil and political in nature, as well as strongly individualistic: They serve negatively to protect the individual from excesses of the state. First-generation rights include, among other things, freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial, (in some countries) the right to keep and bear arms, freedom of religion, freedom from discrimination, and voting rights. They were pioneered in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century during the Age of Enlightenment. Political theories associated with the English, American, and French revolutions were codified in the English Bill of Rights in 1689 (a restatement of Rights of Englishmen, some dating back to Magna Carta in 1215) and more fully in the French
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (french: Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen de 1789, links=no), set by France's National Constituent Assembly in 1789, is a human civil rights document from the French Revol ...
in 1789 and the United States Bill of Rights in 1791. They were enshrined at the global level and given status in international law first by Articles 3 to 21 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and later in the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In Europe, they were enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights in 1953.


Civil and political rights organizations

. There are current organizations that exist to protect people's civil and political rights in case they are infringed upon. The ACLU, founded in 1920, is a well-known non-profit organization that helps to preserve freedom of speech and works to change policy. Another organization is the NAACP, founded in 1909, which focuses on protecting the civil rights of minorities. The NRA is a civil rights group founded in 1871 that primarily focuses on protecting the right to bear arms. These organizations serve a variety of causes one being the AFL-CIO, which is America's union that represent the working-class people nationwide.


See also


References


External links


Abbott, Lewis F. Defending Liberty: The Case for a New Bill of Rights. (2019). ISR/Google Books.
*
Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Global Freedom Struggle
~ an online multimedia encyclopedia presented by the King Institute at Stanford University, includes information on over 1000 civil rights movement figures, events and organizations
Encyclopædia Britannica: Article on Civil Rights Movement

The History Channel: Civil Rights Movement

Civil Rights: Beyond Black & White
– slideshow by '' Life magazine''
Civil rights during the Eisenhower Administration, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library
{{Authority control Human rights concepts Identity politics Rights