[qubex]

I'm sorry, but you are absolutely misinformed. If I am a citizen of a country that does not, for example, recognise the right to vote then there is no higher authority I can go to in an attempt to obtain redress, both because there is no higher authority, and because the vote is not a right in this legal system. No rights have been violated, they are simply not extant in this system.

[wfo]

I think you misunderstand fundamentally, GP is saying that no matter the position of the current government there are absolute inalienable rights which is a common position to take (outlined in the founding of the US, for example) and that there is indeed a higher authority than government, morality/religion/philosophy/humanism. Some consider, e.g. the UN declaration of human rights to enumerate rights which can be violated by governments even though you cannot go to the UN for redress.

You are considering a 'right' to be defined as 'a thing the particular current government allows you to do' which is a great technical legal definition in service of blind unquestioning obedience to the powerful and is a nice clean enunciation of the universally rejected philosophical principle "might is right" but is actually the exact opposite of what most people mean when they refer to rights. The law (even highest law of the land) and its enforcers can violate your rights and you can defend your rights by refusing to obey unjust law, for example. The whole point of saying a right exists is to define what it means for a government to be evil or oppressive; to deny natural rights. To say rights are defined by what the government permits is to say no government can ever be evil or oppressive, and that it justifies itself by its power and nothing more, an idea we rejected hundreds of years ago as a race when we moved past the divine right of kings.

[qubex]

Thank you for your explanation but I do not misunderstand. ”Natural Rights” is just a concept political philosophers came up with to suggest there should be some minimal set of identical rights in all legal systems. It is a suggestion, not a source of law.

Case in point: in a thread broadly pertaining to the law in the UK you bring up the US Constitution, and its enunciation of rights in the first batch of amendments (otherwise known as the Bill Of Rights). No such analogue exists in UK law because (despite being a constitutional monarchy) the UK has no explicit written constitution (at least not a single specific document whose amendment or modification requires special supermajority in parliament).

The US Constitution's Bill of Rights famously proclaims US citizens' rights to bear arms. No analogue exists in UK law. What is a natural rights proponent to make of that? That the UK has implemented less of the natural rights than the US has? That bearing arms is not a natural right? That the US allows rights that are not natural rights? These would all be spurious conclusions because rights need not map across legal systems and certainly do not ”inherit” from one golden standard of ”natural rights”.

I think it is easy for us technologically-inclined people to think of various legal systems as differing implementations of a ”natural rights specification”, and come away with a feeling that there are various levels of correctness or preferrability. That's the wrong mindset, though. A better one would be that each legal system is a formal system built up from different and sometimes incompatible axioms, so that some support some theorems and others don't (but support other theorems).