Human Rights in Hanna’s Waśkiewicz Interpretation

Abstract

Human rights are an issue of a particular importance. Hovewer, in opinion of Hanna Waskiewicz, there are still many unsolved problems concerning this field. One of such problems is defining the term of human rights. According to Hanna Waskiewicz, human rights originated from natural law. Human rights are presented as legal rights that every human being is entitled to in the same extent. In accordance to her work, human rights have four distinctive features. They are universal, inherent, inalienable and imprescriptible. Furthermore, she questions the legal basis of human rights and specifically, what type of legal norms the human rights came from. Hanna Waskiewicz has divided the possible solutions to this issue into two groups. The first group establishes that human rights have originated from positive law – the concept of relative human rights. The second group presents the natural law as the source of human rights – the concept of absolute human rights. Finally, Hanna Waśkiewicz wrote about the protection of human rights, as she in particular tried to answer who may threaten the essence of human rights, who defends them and in what ways the human rights can be protected.