‘For Everyone, Everywhere’: On Positive Obligations and the Impossibility of Limits

Human rights theory and doctrine has, after the divisions that characterised the Cold War and the subsequent ‘East Asian Challenge’, settled on an orthodoxy.[1] This is that all human rights are ‘universal, indivisible, and interdependent and [sic] interrelated’.[2] According to this orthodoxy, purported distinctions between ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ rights, or social and economic versus civil and political ones, reflect an incomplete conceptualisation of the content of either. All human rights are, in fact, composed of both negative and positive elements, and all must be realised in the same way – through obligations imposed on the state to ‘respect, protect and fulfil’ them.[3] This might be said to have ‘positivised’ rights both in the doctrinal sense that all are now considered to have positive dimensions to some degree, and in the grander, more theoretical sense that the human rights movement is now broadly considered to require positive state action to realise goals or outcomes.