As Canada prepares to celebrate National Law Day on April 17, marking the 40th anniversary of the signing of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Professor Grégoire Webber reflects on the Charter’s connection with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 in the aftermath of the Second World War. He reviews how rights are best understood to be owed by one person to another, because we all have duties to the community in which our rights are made real. 

The free and full development of every person is the end pursued by community. It is an end informed by the truths (a) that we are all members of the human family and that what is good for me – life and health, understanding and knowledge, family, and more – is good for all others like me, (b) that one aspect of what is good for persons is the sharing of affection and goodwill and care for and between persons, and (c) that practical reason condemns the person whose affection and goodwill reach no further than that of their own person and who has care for no one else.  

These truths are found throughout the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which inspired our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Declaration begins by affirming the shared ‘conscience of mankind’ and our membership in ‘the human family’, a membership that extends to ‘everyone’ without ‘distinction of any kind’. But this basic relationship between persons it is not the only relationship contemplated by the Declaration. 

In addition to the human family is ‘the natural and fundamental group’ that is one’s most immediate family, which is ‘entitled to protection by society and the State’ including with respect to ‘a standard of living adequate’ for its members’ ‘health and well-being’ and ‘an existence worthy of human dignity’. Between one’s membership in the all-encompassing human family and one’s most immediate family, the Declaration also situates the human person ‘in association with others’, ‘in community with others’, and ‘as a member of society’. All of these references to the human person’s relations with others are in turn situated in ‘a social and international order’ so that the ‘rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized’.

That social order in which the human person’s family, associations, communities, and society are all situated is the organising idea behind the Declaration’s many references to ‘the protection of the law’ in ‘the country … to which a person belongs’ and which awards to that person a ‘nationality’. It is through the ‘national effort’ of one’s social order and the ‘international co-operation’ of the international order that are to be realised the ‘economic, social and cultural rights’ of everyone ‘as a member of society’, rights that the Declaration identifies as ‘indispensable’ for the free development of human personality. 

Emerging from the Universal Declaration is an understanding that human rights are to be ‘protected the rule of law’ so that their ‘universal and effective recognition and observance’ may be secured by what the Declaration calls ‘progressive measures, national and international’. The human person is neither alone nor to be left alone: the human milieu and matrix includes the all-encompassing and the immediate family and situates each one of us in a social and international order.

By the time one reaches the Declaration’s penultimate article, it comes as no surprise to read that the ‘free and full development of [human] personality is possible’ not only in ‘community’, but is possible only in community. The truth of this decisive claim on the indispensability of community for the realisation of human rights is approached by understanding how the deprivation of the free and full development of human personality is not only in the loss of opportunities, the closing off of capabilities, the denial of conditions for the free exercise of human rights, as though all such opportunities and capabilities and conditions are ‘givens’ of the human condition. The deprivation of the freedom to become all that one can be is yet more foundational: before loss and closing off are absence and scarcity of opportunities, lack and a poverty of capabilities, unavailability of conditions for the exercise of human rights. Few opportunities, capabilities, and conditions are ‘givens’, near all are to be brought about by what the Declaration refers to as ‘progressive measures’, and all such measures require the human activity of many.

Every one of us, says the Declaration, is to contribute to such activity: we all have ‘duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of [human] personality is possible’. Such duties are not opposed to human rights or to the free and full development of human personality, unless one conceives of one’s rights and development without holding in view the other persons in one’s community and social order and as fellow members of the human family. 

Any such a self-interested conception of one’s human rights is repudiated by the Declaration’s reference, in its first article, to how all human persons are ‘endowed with reason and conscience’ and are all to ‘act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood’. This spirit of friendship is a requirement of reason and of conscience and it rejects any conception of human rights that would allow for an unqualified ranking between ‘me’ – the one who matters – and others that are not me and for that reason make no claim on my conscience.

The ‘limitations’ that the Declaration situates in relation to ‘the exercise’ of one’s rights and freedoms are thus in no way ‘destructive’ of rights and freedoms, as the Declaration itself makes clear in its final article. Such ‘limitations’ are for the purpose of ‘securing due recognition for the rights and freedoms of others’ and of ‘meeting the just requirements of … a democratic society’; they recall that every member of the human family has human rights and affirm that the realisation of everyone’s rights requires the human activity of many. 

No conception of rights is to be admissible if it would deny one’s duties to the community, would oppose human persons and their rights against each other, or would deny that it is only in community that one’s rights and freedoms are most fully realised by the law’s progressive measures.

Professor Grégoire Webber is Canada Research Chair in Public Law and Philosophy of Law at Queen’s Law, cross-appointed to the Department of Philosophy, and Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is joint convenor of the Queen’s Colloquium in Legal and Political Philosophy and joint founder and executive director of the Supreme Court Advocacy Institute.

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