Human Rights Day 2017

"All mankind...being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions." British Philosopher, John Locke.

Today is the celebrated United Nations(UN) Human Rights Day to commemorate the 1948 adopted Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And to this end, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, has issued a call to defend human rights and to uphold justice.

Yet current affairs, from Syria, to Palestine, to Yemen, to Central African Republic, to Libya, to Myanmar, to Venezuela and across all the continents, reveal that the rights of humankind are under pressure - a pressure that must not be sustained if there is to be any hope or pragmatism to achieving international peace and security.

Protection of the inherent dignity and of the equal and alienable rights of all human beings is therefore required.

While life and liberty have become the established two highest priorities to human rights, safeguards of all human rights should never be compromised.

In order to assure the protection of all human rights, a wider definition of natural rights might have to be adopted. The universal and inalienable rights bestowed upon humankind that are non dependent upon law or customs or upon any particular culture or government, are fundamental to the functioning and operating of good and peaceful governance.

In too many jurisdictions, legal rights - those rights bestowed by a given legal system, are often used to restrict and to subtract from the natural rights of individuals. 

Therefore, to retain all human rights, some legal rights that governments could readily suspended, modified, repealed and restricted via human law, might offer better protection under the designation as being inalienable. 

In other words, humanity's continued survival could depend on an acceptance of a wider field of alienable rights over legal rights: a smaller social contract yielding to more rights of the individual.