Mänskliga Rättigheter - Ursprung och tillämpning - en självklarhet?

What are human rights? Why do we have them? Where do they come from? The attempts to answer these questions are as many and as diverse in nature as the times in which they have been asked. For centuries philosophers held the rights as God given, but have in recent times attempted to free them of these non human origins. A sign of this shift in perceptions regarding the rights has been discernable with the founding of the UN and the establishment of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The articles of the European Convention on human rights were directly influenced by the Universal Declaration. In 1953 Sweden ratified the European Convention which today supercedes its national law. This essay treats human rights from different perspectives – historical, philosophical, religious and legal. Philosophy supplies two important concepts: moral universalism and relativism. The former describes an unquestionable moral of sorts, while the latter offers a critique against this universalism. The legal case in which Reverend Åke Green was charged with hate speech directly relates to all these perspectives. From a philosophical standpoint, the discussion of the case provides an important contribution towards the exploration of the following question: What are the values of moral universalism and relativism with regards to human rights? Further discussion rooted in the same question involves what relation the presumably secular human rights of the UN have to the original religious background of the concept