For centuries people have understood that they need to uphold and protect each other’s individual dignity and this concept served as the foundation of human rights.
Regardless of their origin, culture, religion, or level of income, individuals tend to highly value their rights and when something affects those right, people are prone to express their concerns, sometimes even in an aggressive manner.
What are human rights?
There is no single definition that is accepted worldwide because people’s understanding of human rights is constantly changing. However, it is possible to identify a number of common perceptions.
All people have the same basic legal rights, regardless of gender, skin colour, religion, or any other distinction, including the right to work and the right to study. These rights apply to all individuals without exception according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
Rights can be divided into individual and collective (also known as group) rights. Individual rights are those that apply to individuals, while collective rights apply to a group of individuals.
What are individual rights?
Individual rights are the essential liberties that every citizen must have access to in order to live a fair and independent life.
Examples of individual rights:
- The right to a private life
- The right to own private property
- The right to practice any religion one chooses
What are collective rights?
Rather than being held by a single person, collective rights are shared by a community. These rights have historically concerned indigenous peoples as well as other communities whose rights are jeopardized.
Examples of collective rights:
- The right to preserve one’s culture, including the right to speak a native language and teach one’s children in it
- The right to maintain cultural identities unique to ethnic minorities
- The right to own land
- The right of minorities to possess independent self-government
Individual vs collective rights
Groups made up of national minorities and immigrants are vying for the legal acknowledgment of their ethnocultural identities and traditions in various ways. However, collective rights are sometimes criticized since they can interfere with individual rights.
Some group rights are advocated as supplements to individual rights in the belief that they improve and extend traditional liberal concepts to address contemporary issues.
At the same time, those who oppose group rights typically believe that they can limit individual rights, endangering the fundamental liberal democratic concepts of liberty, justice, and equality.
Sociological analysis of various societies reveals that, under the guise of group unity, many organizations attempt to legally impose restrictions on the freedom of the individuals of that group.
Governments should therefore intervene to forbid such practices.
In a nutshell: group rights, also called collective rights, are the rights held by a group as a whole rather than by each of its individual members. Individual rights, on the other hand, are rights enjoyed by each individual. At the same time, collective rights face criticism since some experts say they can limit individual rights.
