Human Rights as the Main Feature of a Civil Society

Human Rights as the Main Feature of a Civil Society.


      One of the main features and necessary conditions of a civil society formation is an observance of human rights by the state.
      Though human rights are rather popular and modern topic nowadays, in many cases journalists, lawyers and officials speaking about human rights don’t understand what human rights mean in truth and what it has to do with everybody’s everyday life. Today in Russia under human rights they began to call absolutely everything even those things that according to the definition can’t be correlated with this category, for example, “right of smoking in public places”. Fair is the following statement: “the problem of human rights is not taken by the majority of population as a priority one yet. Public opinion polls indicate that overwhelming majority of our fellow citizens has a rather uncertain idea of rights and all the more of the forms and methods of their defence” [1]. One of the reasons of such circumstances is that Russia is a former socialist state, and for years there was no definition “human rights” in our country and a common approach to the phenomenon under review has not yet formed by now. That is why our first task is to find out what human rights are, when it is allowed to speak not simply about some violation of legal norms but namely about violation of human rights and therefore international standards, over which the whole system of human rights defence is on the watch.
      The modern interpretation of the conception “human rights” was formed in the second half of the XX century, simultaneously with the formation of UNO. The reason for this was World War II. Existed before the war the principle of non-interference in home affairs of other countries, even if there was a real genocide there but it seemed that there wasn’t any external aggression, was exhausted. If Hitler begins his bloody massacres not with the neighbouring country but with German Jews, and nobody stops him in time, it will certainly lead to regrettable consequences for surrounding states. New UNO