Human Rights, Religious Identity, and the Private-Public Distinction
Journal Title: The Journal of Human Rights - Year 2007, Vol 1, Issue 2
Abstract
It is thought that by respecting an adequately drawn private (or personal) sphere, political institutions can give sufficient freedom to people to develop their distinct cultural and religious identities without compromising human rights values. The public sphere is where rights are observed, the private is where rights claims have no role. However, the distinction between the private and the public sphere is a difficult one to draw. In this paper we argue that there is no pre-theoretical notion of the public and private, but rather that the boundaries between private and public are themselves sensitive to the moral theory of rights one adopts. So rather than rights being understood in terms of the public and the private, the public and private distinction should be understood in terms of rights. As evidence for the lack of an independent distinction we cite a study of cases in European courts, where the public-private distinction was paramount in adjudicating the rights of religious minorities. چکیده در این مقاله، تحلیلی از مسئلة اصلی نظریه و رویة قضایی حقوق بشر را بسط میدهیم. مشکل به برخورد با هویت دینی در دولتهایی مربوط میشود که مدعی دفاع از معیارهای حقوق بشر در اروپا هستند. این مشکل - به عنوان مثال - خود را در قالب ممنوعیت اعمال مذهبی خاصی نشان داده است که تصور میشود اصول مطابق با مبانی دولت در برخی از حکومتهای اروپایی را نقض میکند. از جملة این اعمال مذهبی میتوان به پوشیدن روسری و سایر موارد مذهبی توسط کسانی که وظایفی دولتی برعهده دارند (مانند کارمندان دولت و معلمین) یا کسانی که به اماکن عمومی وارد میشوند (مانند محصّلان مدارس و دانشگاههای دولتی)، اشاره کرد.
Authors and Affiliations
Saladin Meckled-Garcia, Basak Cali
Equality: the Basis of Rule of Law and Peace
Legal concepts are linked together like a chain and so, obviously in macro analysis, each of them will not be independent of other concepts. Rule of Law, is one of the modern theories of public law and one of its foundat...
Human Rights and The Common Good in Catholicism The Criteria of Their Theological Foundation
Theologians whose attention is devoted to social considerations know that the Christian picture of salvation carries with it an ethical commitment which goes well beyond the bounds of intimism The heart of this picture i...
Identity, Dignity, Culture and Human Rights
-
The Right to Neutral Governance, Religion, the State & the Question of Human Rights Compliance
Universal human rights suffer from a lack of consensus on the question: what kind of internal state organisation can actually take these fundamental rights adequately into account? The main intent of this article is to p...
Habermas, Religion and Human Rights
In my paper, I take as a specific example of the relationship between religion and human rights in the work of Jürgen Habermas, asking if there is any possible relationship between religion and the foundations of human...