Rights
via alchook
What the hell does that mean? What is a right? Who guarantees the right?
So if Apu decides to close the Kwikee-Mart for Vishnu day he still gets paid? Who pays him?
A right is something that your local lord (government) promises not take away wholesale, it agrees to take it by piecemeal.
That being said, I think the UN document isn’t a bill of rights as we think of them so much as the set of conditions for a person to live in dignity and according to their conscience. They are supposed to be basic tenants to know when you’ve been stepped on and when you are stepping on someone else.
The form and nature of government and economy in your local country will fill in the blank of who or what guarantees that right. In the US many of the rights are guarantied not by the government but by the working of the economy.
The US has a bill of rights that is supposed to be the guarantor of some the conditions it also (is supposed) break(s) up monopolies which in necessary to the working of capitalist society that guarantees other conditions listed in the UN document.
We use the word right in terms of something that can’t be taken away from us. The UN document uses as something that shouldn’t be taken away, government and economics should work towards all people having them. The UN document is a goal set not an absolute floor, below which you are definitively a monster.
–Zafkiel