The Author Meg Wallace article tries to imply that human rights are violated because; "Over half the Commonwealth countries still criminalize private adult consensual same-sex activity". She does not recognise lack of education and hygiene exposes women to AIDS and other viruses, as their husbands are involved in homosexual activity. Disease in these countries is rife; much caused by bisexual activity.

Underlying her article is an agenda for same sex marriage. She sees because over 50% of countries still criminalize homosexuality this poses a problem to her agenda. Note she uses a soft term "same sex activity", afraid to put it bluntly. Is she suggesting women cannot be involved women's sports or sewing classes? No! There is another underlying agenda which she hides in this article.

If she was a genuine and responsible advocate of human rights she would be involved in real issues like education of women in these countries.

My own response to the question 'why do nations sign up to a convention but not put it into effect' is that signing is easy but implementing is difficult. 'Human rights' make no sense without a society conferring such rights. No baby is born with 'rights' other than those expressly conferred by law — and observed in practice. In Australia infants cannot be prosecuted in the ordinary court system, and they are entitled to go to school to be educated (indeed their parents are compelled to send them there unless there are satisfactory alternatives). Are there others?

FWIW, I would support an Australian Bill of Rights only if it had an accompanying Bill of Responsibilities. I never hear of the latter.

A neat summary of why the Human Rights industry is such a waste of time and space.

I suggest that the author attempts the following exercise: find a randomly selected group of ordinary Australians - say, twenty - and ask them to agree on a charter of "Human Rights".

If they are able to do this - which is itself somewhat dubious - ask them then to frame the laws that would support the charter. On this level, you would without question uncover the many and varied views on what constitutes adherence to the rule of law, and what constitutes individual freedom.

If by some miracle these twenty are able to achieve an end result, contemplate for a moment what would be required to formulate the same across the entire population. And as a final brain-snapping exercise, imagine what it would take to get agreement across the many other countries and cultures that make up our world.

Which is of course why any and all attempts so far to achieve a "Bill of Rights" remain a collection of vague, meaningless and unenforceable platitudes.

There is only one possible deduction. "Human Rights" describes a method by which top-down control is exercised over the citizenry, by a self-selected group of people who think they know what is best for us. By passing laws under its heading, an industry is created for lawyers to argue, interminably, what constitutes one person's "right" when set against another person's "freedom".

Fortunately, we can be regularly put on our guard by articles like this, to remind us of the slippery slope these would-be do-gooders would like us to embark upon.

Human rights are covered by law. Abide by the laws of the land where ever in the world you are. I don't see how a written set of rules in your pocket would stand up, Forever changing, and as complicated as the tax system.

This thread is already solved- because nobody can agree on what a right is, and most perceived rights conflict with someone elses' perceived rights.

The problem is that it’s meaningless to define human rights as whatever States say they are.

For example, obviously there can be no such thing as a human right to own slaves. And there’s no such thing as a human right to have your legitimate freedoms violated. But if legitimate freedoms are only whatever the State defines them to be, and if all the State's revenue depends on coerced human expropriations of people’s labour, how can you avoid human rights abuses?

“Ah but,” say the apologists for political power “taxation is different. It’s legal, and approved by the majority, and by tradition, and it’s necessary to provide public utilities.”

But these are nonsense arguments. For if slavery were legal, or approved by the majority and tradition, and necessary to fund public utilities – as it was in most places and times in history - that didn’t make it okay, did it? So the problem remains how to make the *ethical* distinction between coercively expropriating people’s efforts (slavery - bad) and coercively expropriating people’s efforts (taxation - good).

The starting point is not that we must preserve the existing power structure, and human rights are construed to support its continuance. It’s the other way around, else it’s meaningless.

For example, in the first paragraph, the author contradicts herself. Apparently it’s a “human right” to have your marriage criminalized, if the State arbitrarily considers it an impediment to its social engineering goals. But in the next breath, she reports “Over half the Commonwealth countries still criminalise private adult consensual same-sex activity.”

So it’s a human right to have your private consensual sexual relations criminalized if the State wants it, but not if not!

Human rights cannot be a facile grab-bag of political favours: there is no such thing as a human right to free ice-cream.

The way out of these difficulties is sound theory, as follows. The right of self-ownership is the only moral and rational foundation of all human rights, because even to deny it, one must perform a self-contradiction and thus affirm it.