Learn what human rights really are and the only conflict with other concepts will be due to misunderstanding of rights.

I believe you do so by acknowledging both the strengths and weaknesses in the concept of human rights and argue their usefulness as a springboard for further change, rather than a finished product that is infallible.

Stephanie, Read my essay on human rights, posted here or my book Human rights, what Are They Really? and try to refute their truth. When determined by correct objective analysis I believe fundamental rights are absolutely true.

I don't disagree with the idea or necessity and importance of human rights. But they are a legal and social construction. That is surely not in dispute?

The prevailing doctrine of human rights is a legal and social construction but true human rights are a theory created by identification of certain basic axioms of the human condition and constructing the theory by discursive reasoning. It is unfortunate for humanity that the theory does not have the cognizance it deserves.

What is problematic is the Western conceptualisation based on an individualist ideology - hence the emergence of alternative descriptions of what human rights are:should be - such as the Banjul Charter...

@ Linda, The basic situation of a person is an individual among his/her kind. This is not ideology; it is a fact. The idea that a person is born into a club called society is ideology. That concept generates a paradigm from which most of the comments are coming.

i would say it creates a paradigm on which human rights are built. They cannot exist in a vacuum, but do so as part of a societal system that has been created and formed over time. The very dichotomy of economic and social rights vs political rights arise from the tensions and goals between the eastern and western blocs. So I would agree Linda that there is a fundamental issue around the universality of human rights (AS WE KNOW THEM), but they perhaps serve as a form of utopian ideals that are the best we have come up with so far. Morality is not universal. It is relative to time and place, and my own view would be that human rights also appear to fall into this category.

The paradigm generates rights that have validity within that paradigm. Outside it, in basic reality, they have validity only by coincidence. The Theory of Human Rights was developed in a similar way to a theory in mathematics or physics. First, relevant axioms are discovered and a theory built on them by discursive reasoning. The result is absolutely universal, as math theories are, unless someone can show a mistake or omission in logic. Of course, they first have to read the theory.

As I see it, morality is chosen by the individual person. Therefore, morality is an inadequate base for rules governing human behaviour. True human rights, as referenced above, are a better base.

The science of rights:

https://www.academia.edu/37021128/Scientific_Proof_of_Our_Unalienable_Rights

I actually disagree with this. Human rights are a concept, and one that cannot be enacted without the nation state. Prior to their development and codification, there were no human rights. Human beings are essentially an animal so the idea of us evolving with rights seems somehow ridiculous. They are a socially constructed idea, a good one! But still not something that is somehow built into our being.

Dear Stephanie Rost ,

I’m assuming you are reacting to my reply about the science of rights.

Generally, philosophy guides science where scientific discovery reforms philosophy. This one-to-one mapping of the physical constructal law to Jefferson’s philosophy of “unalienable Rights” introduces a link between the philosophy of natural law to the physical laws of nature of which we are a product of.

Once a discovery of a related law in nature becomes known, we may see new and different things when looking back at those established philosophies of past ages, in particular, the ones that seem to contradict each other. In addition, it is common knowledge that no man-made law or philosophy can change a physical law of nature.

Historically, discovery of a physical law in nature and the ethical application thereof, usually advances the human condition. Therefore, for any “nation state,” the ethical application of “unalienable Rights” (the physical constructal law) historically improves the human condition.

Some background on the constructal law:

https://www.fi.edu/laureates/adrian-bejan

I don't agree with Stephanie's answer at all. Properly derived human rights are like theorems in mathematics. Do such theorems need a nation state to be valid? Did the truth revealed in those theorems not exist before they were enunciated by some mathematician? True human rights are the same. The truth of them always existed. It was only recently that they were discovered. True fundamental rights are not a socially constructed idea. They are a revelation.

My humble perspective is that "human rights" is an integral concept in decolonial argumentation. This is because the former colonised peoples, with the exception of wealthy politicians and those they empower as is prevalent in Africa, are still struggling to be epistemically recognised as cultural beings in some institutions of higher learning and as being more than cheap sources of labour. I propose the African epistemic principle of "ubuntu" which highlights the interdependence of all human beings by emphasising the human-ness we share as a precedent for the evolving, theoretical paradigm of decoloniality.

Article Community elders’ narrative accounts of ubuntu translanguagi...