Human Rights: Terms and Conditions Applied to State Sovereignty and the Limits of Universal Human Rights

This article aims to stir up discourse on the involvement of sovereigns in shaping the kinds of rights available to their people. This is pertinent to understanding how social contract theory and natural rights underpinned and evolved into the postmodern concept of human rights, where it is the supposed duty of each state to protect the rights of its people. The paper includes a global comparative analysis of basic human rights and their availability in various states to understand the role that each government plays in creating such variations that we see in the human rights arena. When the sovereigns, instead of being protectors of the rights, became the givers of these rights, that is when the fate of human rights changed. Whether the change is for better or for worse is what the paper intends to find. This paper delves deeper into the duties of the sovereign as it assumes the role of the ‘guarantor’ and the ‘protector’ of rights, where it, in its own misconception, reveals itself to be a ‘violator’. The concept of human rights and its universality is rather paradoxical to the sovereignty of the states. But are human rights in fact universal? They were certainly meant to be so. If so, is it the reality that we see today in the global trends of human rights?