INTRODUCTION

All modern civic societies tend to organize and regulate their affairs in such manner as ensures that they work for common welfare on one hand and dignity of each individual on the other. The growth and development of humanity comprised in the society depends on the sincerity and commitment to this approach. Human rights are generally rooted in the cultural and political ethos of each free modern State in the present times. The prime reason is that the theory of natural law of existence mandates provision of, and access to, these inalienable and innate rights for optimum growth of the individual as a human to be useful to self and to the society & environment of which he is a part. During the struggle for independence, our freedom fighters raised voice against human rights violations and deprivation of basic civil, political and economic rights at the hands of the foreign rulers. When free India set about the task of preparing a Constitution for self governance, one area on which there was complete unanimity was the subject of fundamental rights. With history of strife emanating from social evils of casteism and communalism, and a large chunk of population engaged in struggle for existence amidst extreme poverty, deprivation, hunger, illiteracy, unemployment and all consequent miseries, it was clear that respect for human rights, not merely in theory, but in practice from the standpoint of good governance could be the only lasting solution for guaranteeing peace, tranquility and equitable development. Taking cue from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that became part of the firmament of international law in 1948, as indeed from Constitutions of other great democracies of the world, India adopted its Constitution that assured one and all that it would be a Democratic Republic aiming to secure to all its citizens Justice, Liberty and Equality while promoting dignity of the individual. The Constitution assured Justice not merely in abstract but Justice of broad spectrum covering social, economic and political rights. The liberty guaranteed to the citizens of India was promised to be inclusive of liberty in the matter of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship. Similarly, if not more importantly, the right to equality, grafted as a basic precept of the State policy, was intended to be not merely of status but of opportunity. To facilitate attainment of these Constitutional goals, enjoyment of basic civil and political rights under the taxonomy of Fundamental Rights was guaranteed as part of its basic structure. This was done by not mere ornamental platitudinous declaration but by making these

rights justiciable and enforceable. These rights are complemented and supplemented by certain universally recognized economic, social and cultural rights known in our polity as the Directive Principles of State Policy, treated as fundamental in the governance of the country and, therefore, subject matter of the duty of the State to apply. The regime of these human rights, recognized by our Constitution, is founded on common objective, namely the welfare of the individual on one hand and of the society on the other. In this sense, they are interdependent for facilitating attainment of democratic aspirations of We, the people of India as a whole. Human Rights movement in the free world reached a landmark when UN General Assembly adopted a resolution, in December 1993, to endorse Paris Principals of 1991 that mooted the idea of establishing Institutions designed to provide guidance and directions for affording better protection of human rights. In the wake of these developments India, committed to respect for international law and treaty obligations in the dealings of organized people with one another, enacted the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993, with a view to bring about greater accountability and strengthen the dominion of human rights in the country. This enactment widened the field of Human Rights regime in our country by including within its compass, not only the Fundamental Rights but also the rights embodied in two major international covenants, namely the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural rights, both adopted by the UNO in 1966. The International Human Rights regime has made tremendous progress in the last four decades after the adoption of two international covenants mentioned in our Statute. The basic right to life stands enlarged, courtesy pro-active approach of judicial organ, so as to include within its sweep the right to live with dignity, right of health, right to clean environment, right of equitable access to opportunities for optimum growth & development of self, economically, culturally and socially. Concerns for the protection of ecology and pollution free environment have brought under sharp focus the goal of sustainable development rendering it a subject matter of basic human rights. Over the years, the international community has become increasingly aware about the relationship between environmental degradation and human rights abuses. It is now universally accepted that the environmental and human rights are inextricably linked. Poverty situations and human rights abuses are worsened by environmental degradation. This

phenomena occurs for several reasons including the facts that the exhaustion of natural resources leads to unemployment, emigration to cities, leading to adverse impact on public health and negative economic, socio-cultural, and political consequences. The situation brought on by environmental degradation trascends political boundaries and is of critical importance to the preservation of world peace and security. The protection of the environment being at the core of existence of humanity, it has assumed the status of most crucial human right, the protection of which is a matter of universal responsibility. These concerns, in fact, led to inclusion of a duty to protect and improve the environment as part of our State policy under Article 48-A. Honble Dr. Justice A.S. Anand, Chairperson of National Human Rights Commission, in his Address in June 2006 at the inaugural session of United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, said that universality of human rights demand eradication of global inequalities since human rights are interdependent and interrelated and have a direct relationship with human development and because massive inequalities and social evils flowing from poverty render the enjoyment of human rights rather illusory. The world is veering round to this view that holds the concept of human rights underpinning holistic human development. India, thus, has been at the forefront of the growth of human rights jurisprudence. We are the largest democracy of the present day world. We see for ourselves a greater role in near future for maintenance of global peace, tranquility and security with the objective of promoting harmony and the spirit of universal brotherhood amongst the entire humanity. We are committed to work for a world order transcending religious, linguistic and regional or sectional diversities so that each individual has access to opportunities and resources to aspire and strive for excellence and collective enrichment leading to common welfare. These are the very ideals on which our democratic welfare State is founded.

NEED FOR RECOGNITION OF RIGHTS IN A LEGAL SYSTEM

Since the end of the Cold War, international and European law find themselves at the centre of a new search for comprehensive security, for more democratic and society-based decision making structures, and for, amongst many other things, globalisation and Europeanisation with a human face, i.e. globalisation characterised by intensification of world wide economic co-operation, by an open eye for the negative consequences of the free market and by respect for fundamental values. Given these developments, the system of the nation-state and its exclusive competences, as well as the international and European system that was built on its foundations during the 20th century, are gradually being challenged, complemented and partly replaced by new approaches and systems. In the past legal research often concentrated on analysing the characteristics of separate legal systems. Despite the progress that has been made in legal research over previous decades, studies still often focus on a single legal system or only compare one system to another. The underlying assumption is that legal systems have a separate identity, and only relate to one another externally, solely or mainly touching upon each other on the periphery. However, the boundaries of as well as the interaction between legal systems are changing constantly. The following are a number of examples of this trend: The principle of subsidiarity laid down in the Treaty on the European Union is significant in two ways: in the relationship between different national and supranational authorities and in the relationship between those authorities and social organisations and other forms of selfregulation. Human rights are generally considered not to belong to the sovereign domain of States. They are, on the contrary, the common concern of the international community of States as a whole. Modern legal systems have become more open to external influences, not only from other legal systems, but also from society and moral arguments. The development of theoretical approaches such as responsive law and of communicative and interactive visions of legislation makes it clear that much attention is being devoted within jurisprudence to openness towards society. But the relationship between the State and its citizens is also in a process of change: shaping the law is no longer an exclusive competence of State organs. New economic relations are characterised not by the attachment of products to their location, but by the mobility of goods and information and communications services that are independent of any location. States and legal systems 4

confined to one State are losing significance, while simultaneously a need to firmly establish new principles to govern these markets is being expressed. These should, for example, take the rights of employees into consideration. As a result of the increasing permeability of national legal and political orders, new dilemmas emerge for Western States. An example is the import of commodities produced by means of child labour. Another example is the practice by Western drug companies of performing risky experiments on vulnerable patients in Third World countries. Both examples refer to practices outside the territory of a State, which can nevertheless conflict with its prevailing norms and values. Thus a need has been felt within all nation states to incorporate essential human rights into their legal framework so as to ensure an effective functioning of such systems.

LEGAL RIGHTS
Legal rights are, clearly, rights which exist under the rules of legal systems. They raise a number of different philosophical issues. (1) Whether legal rights are conceptually related to other types of rights, principally moral rights; (2) What the analysis of the concept of a legal right is; (3) What kinds of entities can be legal right-holders; (4) Whether there any kinds of rights which are exclusive to, or at least have much greater importance in, legal systems, as opposed to morality; (5) What rights legal systems ought to create or recognise. It has been suggested that even some sophisticated earlier systems, such as Roman law, had no terminology which clearly separated rights from duties (see Maine (1861), 26970). The question is primarily one for legal historians and will not be pursued here, but it may be remarked that it may still be legitimate when describing those systems to talk of rights in the modern sense, since Roman law, for example, clearly achieved many of the same results as contemporary systems. Presumably, it did so by deploying some of the more basic concepts into which rights can, arguably, be analysed. MEANS OF CONFERRING LEGAL RIGHTS Many of the issues relating to this are not confined to rights, but are shared with duties and powers, so only a brief outline will be given.

In most modern legal systems certain fundamental rights are conferred by the constitution. This usually gives them a certain degree of priority over competing legal considerations, but this can vary from system to system. Sometimes constitutional rights will have an absolute priority over any other consideration not itself based on a constitutional right. Sometimes they will merely favour one legal outcome rather than another, without dictating it. Constitutions will vary, too, as to whether certain rights are entrenched or not. Entrenchment can be absolute, in which case the rights cannot be removed or altered by any constitutional means (as is the case with some of the basic rights in the German Constitution), or it can be relative, requiring only a more onerous procedure than that for normal legislation (as with the Constitution of the USA.). Constitutions will also vary on the extent to which human rights recognised under international law or treaty are recognised in national law. For example, in some countries in Europe, the European Convention on Human Rights, and decisions of the European Court of Human Rights thereon, are incorporated into national law and override any national law inconsistent with them. In others, such as the United Kingdom, the courts have, so far as possible, to interpret legislation to be consistent with the Convention, but have no power to strike it down if they find it to be clearly inconsistent. Other rights can be conferred by normal legislation or by common law (ie. the tradition of judge-made law). One interesting point is that, arguably, many legal rights are conferred by no positive law, but arise simply from the absence of any law to the contrary. That is, it is probably a practical necessity that every legal system has an unwritten closure rule to the effect that whatever is not prohibited is permitted. If some types of rights are essentially permissions, then many such rights arise in this way. In most legal systems my right to cross the street, for example, is of this nature. Probably no positive law will say that I can do so, and possibly no more general enacted right will imply it.

THE CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS OF LEGAL RIGHTS

Not all philosophers have agreed that rights can be fully analysed. White (1984), for example, argued that the task is impossible because the concept of a right is as basic as any of the others, such as duty, liberty, power, etc (or any set of them) into which it is 6

usually analysed. He agrees, however, that rights can in part be explained by reference to such concepts. White's approach, based largely on close linguistic analysis, has remained something of a minority one. The remaining approaches can be categorised in different ways, but a main division is between those who think that rights are singled out by their great weight as practical reasons, and those who think that rights are not special in this regard, but instead are to be analysed into duties, permissions, powers, etc, or some combination of these, perhaps with the addition of other conditions. Dworkin (1973, 1975, 1981, 1986) has been the principal proponent of the first view. According to him rights enjoy a categorial priority in weight over any other consideration which is not itself right-based. Clearly, it is true of many legal systems that constitutional rights, or some of them, should outweigh any other consideration which is not itself derived from a constitutional right. But that seems to be primarily because of the constitutional status of the right. Both in law and in morality many rights are of a rather trivial nature. In morality such rights can, arguably, sometimes be justifiably outweighed even by considerations of personal convenience (cf. Raz (1978)). Similarly in law it seems that many prima facie rights can be defeated by what the court regards as considerations of the general interest. Dworkin's (1977) response to the latter type of criticism has been to argue that, on closer inspection, the consideration opposing the right can be seen as itself an instantiation of another general right. But this depends on the contentious claim that the only considerations that courts can justifiably rely upon are preexisting rights. The objection has also been raised that, as a general theory of the nature of rights, it risks being self-defeating, since any consideration whatsoever can then be argued to be right-based, which leaves rights with no special role in practical reasoning. Most writers have, instead, favoured the view that rights are to be analysed into other, more basic, notions, principally those of duty, permission and power, with perhaps the addition of other criteria. This means that not all rights will be of great importance. Their importance will vary with the strength of the grounds for the duty, permission or power. Before looking more closely at these accounts, another point should be mentioned. Theorists are divided between those who think that rights are, as it were, the reflex of the duty, permission or power, and those who think that the right has a priority over them.

The question is whether the duty, etc, grounds the right, or the right the duty. Most older writers (e.g., Bentham, Austin, Hohfeld, Kelsen) appear to have adhered to the first view, whilst more recent writers (e.g., MacCormick, Raz, Wellman) take the second. The second view has the implication that the force of a right is not necessarily exhausted by any existing set of duties etc, that follow from it, but may be a ground for creating new duties as circumstances change. This latter view seems to accord better at least with the way that constitutional legal rights work. Amongst those who think that rights can be analysed, at least in part, into duties, permissions and powers, there is a further main division. Some think that the essence of a right is to have choice or control over the corresponding duty etc. Others think that the main thing is that one's interests are protected by the duty etc. Hart and Wellman are amongst the proponents of the first view, Bentham, Austin, MacCormick and Raz are amongst those maintaining some version of the second.

RIGHTS IN A DEMOCRATIC INDIAN SYSTEM

The question is whether a charter of rights cramps the powers of the Government and thus creates difficulty for the functioning of an effective Government. The question is linked with the question as to why and for what purpose we need a Government. Whatever might have been the notion in the primitive stage of mankind and during the subsequent periods of history, the modern view is that the aim of a good Government is to bring about security, welfare and happiness of the people. Of all the various forms of Government, democratic Government with a bill of rights comes nearest to the ideal for the attainment of those objectives. There can indeed be no genuine democracy where the citizens do not enjoy rights and civil liberties like free these attributes of a State, we can have no freedom from fear. Base of Democracy; In Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India, Bhagwati, J. observed as follows: Democracy is based essentially on free debate and open discussion, for that is the only corrective of Government action in a democratic set up. If democracy means Government of the people, by the people, it is obvious that every citizen must be entitled to participate in the democratic process and in order to enable him to intelligently

exercise his right of making a choice, free and general discussion of public matters is absolutely essential. Discrimination on ground of gender was held illegal as in Valsamma Paul v. Cochin University1, where the Supreme Court has held that:Human Rights are derived from the dignity and worth inherent in the human person. Human rights and fundamental freedoms have been reiterated Declaration of Human Rights. Democracy, development and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms are inter-dependent and have mutual reinforcement. The human rights for women including girl child are, therefore, inalienable, integral and individual part of the Universal human rights. The full development of personality and fundamental freedoms and equal participation by women in political, social and economic and cultural life are concomitants for national development, social and family stability and growth-cultural, social and economical. All forms of discrimination on grounds of gender is violative of fundamental freedoms and human rights. There is in the world of today a high-powered salesmanship in ideas. The art of propaganda had by no means its origin in this century, but during the Second World War it acquired new dimensions. By raising a smoke-screen of catchwords, by whipping up our passions on some monetary issues, an attempt is made quite often to cloud our thinking and hyponotise our mental faculties. Slogans are coined and euphemistic expressions created to confer respectability upon and seek justification for acquisition of more powers. It is at moments like these that we need the sentinels to make us aware of the danger which underlies the disposition to take the immediate for the eternal, the transitory for the permanent and the ephemeral for the timeless. This necessarily calls for a determined resistance to the hypothecation of the thinking process. It also postulates a free trade in ideas. No one can under-rate the importance of this trade for the health and growth of the society. It is for the fraternity of the Press, the members of the Bar, the legislators and the enlightened sections of the community to make a vital and
1

in the Universal

AIR 1996 SC 1020

significant contribution in the carrying on of this trade. And it is also for them to act as watchdogs and sentinels of qui vive of cherished values. Unless the enlightened sections of the community are prepared to discharge the above function and undertake that role, even at the cost of some risk, the future of civil liberties and human rights would remain bleak. Freedom of expression.--In Handyside v. United Kingdom, The European Court while dealing with Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights about freedom of expression held as follows :-The Courts supervisory functions oblige it to pay the utmost attention to the principles characterizing a democratic society. Freedom of expression constitutes one of the essential foundations of such a society, one of the basic conditions for its progress and for the development of every man. Subject to Article 10(2), it is applicable not only to information or ideas that are favorably received or regarded as inoffensive or as a matter of indifference, but also to those that offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population. Such are the demands of that pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness without which there is no democratic society. This means, amongst other things, that every formality, condition, restriction or penalty imposed in this sphere must be proportionate to the legitimate aim pursued.

BHIKHU PAREKH IMPORTANCE OF RIGHTS IN A MODERN LEGAL SYSTEM

Bhikhu Parekhs in his book Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory sets out to design paths for multiculturalism and the importance of rights oriented legislation in the 21st Century. Parekhs account of multiculturalism is located, on the highly contentious ground of debates within liberalism and presented from such perspectives as post-Marxism, post-colonialism, race theory and feminism, and from a wide range of disciplines: philosophy, political theory, cultural studies, cultural anthropology, and pedagogy.

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Rethinking Multiculturalism is organized into three sections: the historical, theoretical, and practical, together forming an integrated survey of overlapping naturalist/culturalist, and monist/pluralist traditions developed within liberalism and determining the liberal thought. He has through his works beautifully brought out the latest issues surfacing various classes and communities of mankind where the rights and integrity of their mode of expression is hampered by State in the name of social security. In the chapter on Contemporary Liberal Responses to Diversity, Parekh looks at three contemporary liberal philosophers: Rawls (A Theory of Justice, 1971), Raz (The Morality of Freedom, 1986), and Kymlicka (Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, 1995), who, stressing different liberal principles, respond to the phenomenon of cultural diversity and foster possible ways of handling it on the level of the state, social structures, and moral grounds. The overall concern of this chapter is to examine whether contemporary liberal thought is able to face the challenge of multicultural society without resorting to its own hegemonizing mechanisms that Parekh traced down to the foundations of liberalism. Of these three philosophers Kymlicka is an interesting example of what Parekh labels a liberal nationalist. He also rests his theory on the commitment to autonomy and considers it the basis of liberal political tradition, but, unlike Raz, he does not attribute the highest value to personal autonomy. Kymlickas definition of cultural community largely coincides with that of the nation; he indeed founds his theory of the minority rights on the concept of national units as the most complete cultural achievements, and thus he rejects the assimilationist approach as impinging on the principle of justice which demands that minorities and majority should enjoy equal rights and a share of autonomy. National majority and minority differ only in quantitative terms, not qualitative ones, which means that they operate within the same logic. According to the same principle of justice and the logic of social structures, national minorities have the most rights to cultural claims and other forms of pressure on the state, and, likewise, individual immigrants the least. Kymlicka explains this bizarre polarity in the following way: national minority remains a discrete cultural and social unit, and, since culture is defined via nation and community, it fares better than an individual immigrant who, by an act of immigration subscribes automatically to the new culture, which now becomes for him his host culture and

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nation. Parekh notices that such a hierarchy of minority rights cannot be sufficiently justified on the basis of commitment to autonomy - it might as well run against this principle. Parekh makes an important suggestion here: such negotiation of the inalienable values should not be confined to local contexts such as the nation-state. In fact, he envisages the cross-cultural dialogue as an all-encompassing, global debate translatable into political programs on the macro- and micro-scale. At this point Parekhs argument develops in an interesting but also precarious manner. After emphasizing the need for cross-cultural dialogue, he moves on, as if to prove the necessity of such dialogue, to discussing examples which failed to recognize the above necessity. He starts with the UN Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which, although worked out by a forum of the UN member countries, is clearly liberal in its spirit and design, and thus cannot claim universal validity. According to him, The rights are addressed to the state which alone is deemed to have the obligation to respect and realize them. In his theory on rights, Parekh rightly shows how easily multiculturalism can be manipulated to serve the interests of authoritarian regimes justifying their violations of collective and individual rights via cultural relativism, although his presentation of relativism as natural and commonsensical may be a bit too persuasive, obliterating the ideological investments behind it.

RECONSTITUTING THE MODERN STATE

Parekhs main interest is in rethinking the theory of the state so that it makes space for multiculturalism. Bringing together the requirements of the modern state (183): a distinct territory; a set of constitutional principles; equal rights for citizens; the concept of citizenship as a unitary, unmediated, homogeneous relationship between the individual and the state; reliance on a single and united people (a collective of individual citizens), he emphasizes the most important features of the state, which are its secular foundation, content-empty system of governance, and transparency of its structures, all leading to what he terms an unprecedented regime of personal liberties and rights. Thus, the state creates a space for collective civic action and identity, as well as for personal autonomy. However, the necessary conditions of the states existence and functioning, such as a 12

single and unified people bound to the state with the demand of loyalty, become at the same time its limitations. Citizenship is by definition a content-empty category, placing the value of an individual above any specific identities: ethnic, religious, or other communal ones. On the other hand, citizenship inscribes individuals into a collectivity of anonymous participants in the shared abstract whole. While this invites politics as an interaction between equals, the opposite effect -- that of discouraging activity for an abstract, anonymous construct is equally possible. The state ceases to be a forum for political debate between citizens and is associated with a depersonalized, mechanistic bureaucracy. In this sense, the nation-state seems to be an obvious end-product of the state theory, or, in a reverse order, its primary reference. Parekh notes that all major theories of the state -liberal, communitarian and nationalist-- are based on the assumption of the states homogeneity, and differ only as to the degree of homogeneity they claim as necessary for the states functioning. Designing the political structure of a multicultural society, Parekh again stresses the necessity of constitutionally secured set of basic rights and such functioning of a system of justice which would enable those who need to overcome disadvantages derived from cultural differences or past acts of injustice to benefit from what he calls the equalizing measures. He argues that such measures should not be perceived as a manifestation of good will on the part of the state, but, rather, as a necessary responsibility of the state for what must be considered a part of its historical inheritance. Considering a possibility of a commonly shared culture in a multicultural society, Parekh once again stresses the fact that such an interculturally created and multiculturally constituted culture must be both complex (internally dialectic and dynamic), and unforeseeable at least to some degree. This kind of culture is dangerous in the sense that it cannot be easily confined into separate cultural affinities; it is inevitably hybridizing and growing on its own increasing complexity. However, drawing this line of development for multicultural interaction and togetherness within the framework of the state, Parekh seems to yet again work along the line of division between pluralism and monism. He does make a salutary claim that

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diversity should pervade both private and public spheres in order to make a wider society at all possible, but he makes the potential conflict somehow too easy to remedy.

CRITICISM OF PAREKHS VIEW ON RIGHTS

While he is probably right in criticizing the Declaration for its statist view of human rights and its inability to bridge the general understanding of human rights with their local variations (if such bridging is possible in the first place), his refusal to see the Declaration in its historical context suspends his critique in the universalistic void. Three years after World War II human rights were seen as threatened mainly by the state, hence the responsibility the Declaration charted the state with. Parekhs other point, that the values promoted by the Declaration need a specific institutional support worked out largely by the liberal state, then itself culturally specific, seems to be equally unconvincing - Parekh runs the risk of ascribing the democratic spirit and form of governance solely to western society, although this is not his purpose by any means. He also, in his works has not managed to clarify how international organizations such as the UN should perform the politics of securing the rights they are designed to secure on the premise of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and, at the same time, respect the right to moral diversity, which includes the right to a different perception of a human being and its place and role in society. The problem that is that he understands culture almost excessively in moral terms. He claims that an individual has the right to criticize its culture in order to remove its blemishes, that different cultures correct and complement each other so cultural diversity can be seen as a way to recognize the variety of possibilities to lead a good life; and, finally, that the mechanisms used for evaluating and respecting a culture are enhanced by the confrontation with another culture. While it is difficult to disagree with Parekhs line of argument, the vital questions of how conflicts between cultures arise and how to prevent them remain unanswered. Parekh seems to put too much faith in the enlightening nature of cultural interaction; he assumes that our judgments of other cultures will be naturally rational and respectful. Although such an approach is of an immense moral validity, the doubt underlying the whole argument

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remains -- does tolerance need to be justified in the wake of present day circumstances where terrorism and anti-cultural movements are taking their pace.

CONCLUSION
Parekh rightly observes that western societies have a remarkable potential for openness and tolerance, not only because they are relatively stable politically, but because they are founded on diverse political traditions. This is not to say that Parekh sees the western society as multicultural par excellence; quite the reverse, by recognizing this potential he also implies possible threats, the most ominous of which seems to be the self-gratifying idealization of western-European political developments. Parekhs main interest is in rethinking the theory of the state so that it makes space for multiculturalism. Bringing together the requirements of the modern state: a distinct territory; a set of constitutional principles; equal rights for citizens; the concept of citizenship as a unitary, unmediated, homogeneous relationship between the individual and the state; reliance on a single and united people (a collective of individual citizens), he emphasizes the most important features of the state, which are its secular foundation, content-empty system of governance, and transparency of its structures, all leading to what he terms an unprecedented regime of personal liberties and rights. Whereas, according to Dworkin, rights enjoy a categorial priority in weight over any other consideration which is not itself right-based. In this sense, the nation-state seems to be an obvious end-product of the state theory, or, in a reverse order, its primary reference. The growth and development of humanity comprised in the society depends on the sincerity and commitment to this approach. Human rights are generally rooted in the cultural and political ethos of each free modern State in the present times. The liberty guaranteed to the citizens of India was promised to be inclusive of liberty in the matter of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship. Similarly, if not more importantly, the right to equality, grafted as a basic precept of the State policy, was intended to be not merely of status but of opportunity. To facilitate attainment of these Constitutional goals, enjoyment of basic civil and political rights under the taxonomy of Fundamental Rights was

15

guaranteed as part of its basic structure. These rights are complemented and supplemented by certain universally recognized economic, social and cultural rights known in our polity as the Directive Principles of State Policy, treated as fundamental in the governance of the country and, therefore, subject matter of the duty of the State to apply. The regime of these human rights, recognized by our Constitution, is founded on common objective, namely the welfare of the individual on one hand and of the society on the other. In most modern legal systems certain fundamental rights are conferred by the constitution. This usually gives them a certain degree of priority over competing legal considerations, but this can vary from system to system. Sometimes constitutional rights will have an absolute priority over any other consideration not itself based on a constitutional right. Over the years, the international community has become increasingly aware about the relationship between environmental degradation and human rights abuses. human rights are interdependent and interrelated and have a direct relationship with human development and because massive inequalities and social evils flowing from poverty render the enjoyment of human rights rather illusory.

16

 Dworkin, Ronald M. (1973). Taking Rights Seriously, in Simpson, AWB, ed, Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence, Second Series, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 202; reprinted in his Taking Rights Seriously, revd edn, London: Duckworth, 1978, 184 Parekh, Bhikhu (2000) Rethinking Multiculturalism: Chapter 7: The Political White, Alan R. (1984). Rights, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Raz, Joseph (1978). Professor Dworkin's Theory of Rights, (1978) 26 Political Dworkin, Ronald M. (1977). Seven Critics, (1977) 11 Georgia Law Review Structure of Multicultural Society.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Studies 123. 1201.

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