Posted 30 August 2006 06:40 PM on armsandthelaw
A report (pdf format) submitted by Barbara Frey, Special Rapporteur, whatever that is, to the UN Human Rights Councils's Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, whatever that is.
Re-reading it, I think the point is that the Special Rapper wants to class self-defense as something less than a "right" (i.e., as a manner of criminal defense) because if it were recognized as a "right" it would be something governments would be bound to guarantee -- and that leads right to Prof. Glenn Harlan Reynold's argument that a right to arms should be guaranteed as an international right. How could governments "guarantee" such a right (in the sense of doing something more than saying "you can plead this as a defense if prosecuted" -- as might be expected the UN document treats "rights" as something more than "the government must leave you alone" -- while outlawing the items a person needs to exercise that right? This leads to the anomaly that the report claims that the right to life is a "right," but the right to keep from having your life taken is not. I suppose it equates to -- you have a "right," however unenforcable, to be protected by government, but not to defend yourself if it fails to do so. As might be expected from the source, the concept of "right" is rather ineptly socialist: rights are what you may ask the government to do for you. (And of course strongly of the legal positivist school: rights are not something that pre-exist government, and any official declaration of them, derived from a deity, morality, or man's nature. Rather, in this view they are created by the document, or government, that acts to write them down. Created, as opposed to guaranteed).
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