Individual rights, also known asnatural rights, arerights held by individuals by virtue of being human. Some theists believe individual rights are bestowed byGod. An individual right is a moral claim to freedom of action.[1]
Group rights, also known ascollective rights, arerights held by a group as a whole rather than individually by its members.[2] In contrast,individual rights are rights held byindividual people; even if they are group-differentiated, which most rights are, they remain individual rights if the right-holders are the individuals themselves.[3][clarification needed]
Individual rights and group rights are often incompatible. An appeal to group rights is often used to promote violation of individual rights. Historically, group rights have been used both to infringe upon and to facilitate individual rights, and the concept remains controversial.[4]
Besides the rights of groups based upon the immutable characteristics of their individual members, other group rights exercised and enshrined in law at different levels including those held by organizational persons, including nation-states,trade unions,corporations, trade associations, chambers of commerce, specificethnic groups, andpolitical parties.[citation needed] Such organizations are accorded rights that are particular to their specifically stated functions and their capacities to speak on behalf of their members, i.e. the capacity of the corporation to speak to the government on behalf of all individual customers or employees or the capacity of the trade union tonegotiate for benefits with employers on behalf of all workers in a company.
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In the political views ofclassical liberals and someright-libertarians, the role of the government is solely to identify, protect, and enforce the natural rights of the individual while attempting to assure just remedies for transgressions. Liberal governments that respect individual rights often provide for systemic controls that protect individual rights such as a system ofdue process incriminal justice. Certain collective rights, for example, the right of "self-determination ofpeoples,"[5] enshrined in Chapter I Article I of theUnited Nations Charter, enable the establishment to assert these individual rights. Ifpeople are unable to determine their collective future, they are certainly unable to assert or ensure their individual rights, future and freedoms.[6] Critics suggest that both are necessarily connected and intertwined, rejecting the assertion that they exist in a mutually exclusive relationship.[6]
Adam Smith, in 1776 in his bookThe Wealth of Nations, describes the right of each successive generation, as a group, collectively, to the earth and all the earth possesses.[7] TheUnited States Declaration of Independence states several group, or collective, rights of the people as well as the states, for example the Right of the People: "whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it" and the right of the States: "... as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do."[8]
Dutch legal philosopherHugo Krabbe (1908) outlined the difference between the community and individual perspectives:
Thus, two kinds of perspectives on the state emerge from the history of the theory of the state. That of antiquity takes the community as a natural given, sees in her a being of the fullest reality, bearer of all cultural life, requiring no more justification than the existence of the Sun. And there can be no question of granting rights here either, because the only being from whom those rights could come, the individual, derives his jurisdiction precisely from belonging to the community, and only from that. Opposed to this is the conception of the state from the school of natural law, which takes the individual as its starting point, asserts his natural freedom as a right, creates the community from his will and endows her with rights derived from him. To recap,
on the one hand, the community is primary, with her own original right, and the individual secondary, with his rights derived from the community;
on the other hand, the individual is primary, with all the content of his natural freedom as a right, and the community is secondary, a product of individual will and therefore dependent on him in jurisdiction.[9]: 12–13
TheSoviet Union argued in line withMarxism–Leninism that theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights over-prioritized individual rights over group rights.[10]
