What are Human Rights

2. An introduction to Human Rights

2.1. What are Human Rights

Human rights are a set of minimum standards, often expressed in legal documents, for guiding how individuals in a society should live, respect and interact with each other and how institutions, whether government or non-governmental, should respect and interact with individuals. Human rights encompass freedoms and privileges as well as entitlements and obligations.

The table below lists some of the main or core human rights that we hear about most often. We will come back to some of these later in the unit when we look at how they apply to health care and what community health workers and other health workers do.

Table 1: Examples of human rights

Human rights

Right to life

Right to equality

Right to privacy

Right to non-discrimination

Right to dignity

Right to equality before the law

Right to a fair trial

Right to access to information

Right to freedom and security of the person

Right to freedom of expression

Right to freedom from torture

Right to health and health care

Right to sufficient food and water

Right to adequate housing

Right to adequate sanitation

Right to basic education

It is clear from the table how human rights influence almost everything we do and how we interact with each other!

There are three main types of human rights that we all share: civil, political and socio-economic. Civil rights include things like the right to life, the right to dignity, the right to a fair trial. Political rights include things like freedom of thought or belief, the right to join political parties and to participate in social movements, and the right to vote. Socio-economic rights include those things that are essential to human survival, such as the right to health, the right to food or shelter, and the right to equality.

You can find the definitions of the each of these rights and the different international documents where they are defined in Annex 1 to this module.