Human Rights and Community - The Community of Rights and the Community of Responsibilities
This paper will explore first the necessary connection between human rights and human responsibilities, and second the necessary connection between human rights/responsibilities and human community.
Human rights imply responsibilities: not only on the part of the individual, but also on the part of the family, the community, civil society, the state, and the global community. Indeed, ‘human rights advocacy/activism’ might more appropriately be labelled ‘human responsibilities advocacy/activism’ as the advocacy and action are not so much aimed at establishing the ‘existence’ of a right, but rather at defining the associated responsibility and working to ensure that responsibility is met by the relevant actor.
Understood in this way, human rights and human responsibilities make no sense in an individualistic world of enlightened self-interest, where ‘there is no such thing as society’. Rather, human rights imply human community, where people are linked by an interlocking network of rights and responsibilities. Rights and responsibilities are constructed in community, and ideas of ‘my rights’ need to be replaced by ideas of ‘our rights’.
From this position, the paper will argue the necessary linking of human rights work and community development: both can be seen as working towards the recognition and achievement of some notion of a collective ‘common humanity’/’human community’. This suggests that social workers, with expertise in community development, are ideally located to be human rights workers, and the implications for social work of this synthesis of human rights and community will be briefly explored.