IV. ANALYSIS OF THE CURRENT IDEA
OF NATURAL RIGHTS
According to the theory of natural rights, the dignity
of the human person is supposed to take precedence
over any social order. With Alfred Verdross we may
formulate five propositions which follow from this
axiom:
(1) each social order must recognize in the person
a sphere within which the person may act as a
free and responsible agent;
(2) the law must protect and guarantee the free
exercise of a person's action;
(3) the authority of the governing body must be
limited;
(4) respect for this limitation must be guaranteed;
(5) respect for authority is not absolute, but subor-
dinate to the dignity of the human person.
Natural rights, being tied by hypothesis to the very
nature of man and prior to any social order, cannot
be conferred by political authority, but should be rec-
ognized and declared by the latter. Despite the lack
of such declarations, these rights exist nonetheless.
Declarations are therefore only a solemn affirmation
of these rights and only a catalogue of the latter, as
well as an expression of the wish to protect these rights.
Natural rights presuppose a fundamental postulate
of equality. They are indeed tied to the idea of justice,
that is, to equal treatment for all those who belong
essentially to the same category. Natural rights, in
short, imply the notion of a human family, in which
no discrimination is permitted whether based on sex,
race, religion, or any other criterion.
The first of these natural rights is obviously freedom.
From it follow the other basic rights, notably property,
the patrimonially protected prolongation of freedom,
the security of guarantees of the free enjoyment and
right of resistance to oppression, which is the supreme
remedy against a political power's failure to respect
natural rights or to be constrained by legal means to
respect those rights. These are, moreover, the other
basic rights recognized by the French Declaration of
the Rights of Man of 1789 (article 2) and restated in
the Constitution of 1791: “the aim of every political
association is the consecration of the natural and
inalienable rights of man. These rights are freedom,
property, security, and the right of resistance to
oppression.”
The expression “natural rights” is consequently often
a synonym for the “rights of man.” In a more technical
sense the expression is reserved for the right of exist-
ence, bodily safety, health, sexual life, personality,
respect for mortal remains, etc.
Bound up with a historico-critical development, the
idea of natural rights is subject to evolution and thereby
to a growing enrichment; a comparison of recent
declarations with those of the eighteenth century is
very enlightening in this respect. The extension of
natural rights to new domains is a constant one, for
example, in the social or cultural domain (see the
Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man of Decem-
ber 10, 1948 which was accepted by the General
Assembly of the United Nations).
