CHARTER OF FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS OF THE EUROPEAN UNION

European Parliment ^ | 18/12/2000 | European Parliment Comittee

[Salman]

And what is the EU that it should list rights as if it is their creator?

The precedent for this is the concept of rights under medieval feudalism. Rights are something granted by a "lord" to his vassals and dependents. Be it a king to a duke or a baron to his peasants. No notion of equal rights, of course.

The king rules by divine right, but all other rights are created by Man.

This isn't quite the EU formulation, but you can see how their attitiude has its roots here.

Though we may find the concept of natural rights in human nature or the Bible, as a political force in world politics it started with the American Revolution.

[Princeliberty]

Not the same in that they take God out the picture
an instead the Government is THE DIVINE POWER!

1984's boot stomping on the human face!

[Salman]

Not the same...

Of course it's not the same, but the old European concept of Man-made rights leads them right down the slippery slope.

For that matter, even with God supposedly in the picture, I'd say the divine right of kings was self-serving nonsense.

Furthermore, if the concept of natural rights can be deduced from human nature (as I believe it can), it is not strictly logically necessary to have God in the picture. In my case, I believe that human nature was created by God, but even atheists such as Thomas Paine believed in natural rights.

Likewise morality. Not that I'd defend the current crop of atheistic anti-humanistic sociatists.

[clikker]

This tries to emulate the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but it doesn't even come close to their simple, elegant, yet incredibly precise language.

[LiteKeeper]

SPOTREP

[kcar]

What a tedious laundry list of entitlements. In the end there is only one natural right: property. Everything else is derived from that. Your right to property in your person and in the effects of your personality says that says that you have a right of free speech, freedom from physical harm, and the right to keep what you've created/earned via voluntary (contractual) agreements. And it's an individual right. A "collective" right is one that can be trumped by the convenience of whoever purports to speak for that "collective".
That one essential individual right that best guarantees all personal freedoms, Property, (what EU calls Article 17), sounds like the most ambiguous and tenuous of the whole lot. It's just whatever the General Interest allows you to keep. Over two hundred years old and the US Bill of Rights is the unrivaled champion of freedom.

[Eastbound]

"And what is the EU that it should list rights as if it is their creator?"

The EU giveth and the EU taketh away.

[catpuppy]

The EU giveth and the EU taketh away.

I think that the "giveth" will be far exceeded by the "taketh away" except when it come to grief and misery.

[Joe Republc]

What about euthansia? I've heard some horror stories about elderly people in the Netherlands being given morphine and slowly starved to death in nursing homes. Will the EU prosecute this?

-- Joe