Indian Politics in Comparative Perspective

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Human Rights: Constitutional Provisions and Practises in India and China

The Notion of Rights in General

According to the Oxford dictionary of Politics, ‘rights can be described as legal or moral recognition of choices or interests to which particular weight is attached’. According to Laski, ‘Rights, in fact, are those conditions of social life without which no man can seek, in general, to be his best.’ A right is basically a justified claim or an entitlement. It means that we are entitled to rights as citizens, as individuals or as human beings. It means to possess a right is to be entitled to do something or to have something done, for instance, right to speak, right to vote etc. In the Middle Ages, theory of rights rested on the idea of ...