Understanding Rights

Rights create a field of rule-governed interactions

To have a right to X is to be entitled to X.
If a particular right is violated, the violator is subjected to special remedial claims and sanctions.
Rights are not simply benefits but they empower individuals. As a rights-enjoyer you are not
simply a beneficiary, and in case of a violation you may assert your right to X, and thus exercise
your rights. Of course, a functioning, responsive, and accountable state that adjudicates those
rights is essential for rights and their exercise to be meaningful.
You exercise/assert/claim/press your right to enjoy the object of your right (activating the
obligations of the duty-bearer) which must be respected by others, and enforced by the
state. You have an entitlement to those rights.
When we consider how rights work: we usually become concerned with them only when they
are at issue, when their enjoyment is questioned, threatened, or denied. Thus, having
(perhaps constitutionally mandated) a right is of most value precisely when one is not actually
able to enjoy that right because of the distortions in the system. One is able to make claims for
enjoyment on the basis of a constitutional right whose enforcement is absent. Donnelly calls
this the possession paradox: possessing a right but not actually being able to enjoy it. One
may possess a right but not have it respected or enforced. Violation of such a right becomes an
injustice with a special force.
And then, perhaps one may not have certain rights at all, but only aspirations. The language of
human rights can fuel those aspirations to have these particular claims instituted in law. This
language is based on principles of individual freedom, equality, universality, inalienability.
To assert a HR is to make a fundamentally political claim i.e. a claim that is attentive to power
dynamics in particular social contexts: that one is entitled to equal moral respect and to the
social status, support and protection necessary to achieve that respect. They do not represent
only simple human dignity and justice, but a certain kind of dignity and justice that is
fundamentally incompatible with insubordination. HRs thus imply a leveling of traditional forms
of hierarchy, privilege and status. Thus, any traditional claim of natural or divinely ordained
subordination of particular individuals and/or groups is undercut sharply by the idea and
discourse of HRs. HRs, thus, challenge power, contest domination, and question authority.

Special claims of Human rights

Human Rights are said to be of moral rights of the highest order. They are international, and in
some cases also national/regional legal rights. Many human rights can be enjoyed as ordinary
legal rights in most domestic legal systems. An appeal to human rights is the highest form of
appeal for justice, or redressal of a wrong, and is claimed when all other appeals have failed.
Human rights become the final moral claim (as are also internationally grounded) to strengthen
or add to existing legal entitlements at the domestic/national level.
Human rights are also special kinds of rights because they are morally prior to legal rights. They
belong to one because of the virtue of being human, and if there is no domestic legal
entitlement yet, the demand for change is based on a prior moral and international-legal claim.