Individual and Legal Rights

What are individual and legal rights?

Individual or Legal rights are a set of privileges separate for each individual country and are set by the government or leaders of that country. These rights should be based, related or close to the UDHR (Universal Declaration of Human Rights), so they don’t violate them. Example could be that country passes law to imprison people in the country with particular religion beliefs. This would clash with UDHR and UN would probably interfere with such government actions like in Syria where government use chemical weapons on own citizens.

All of the Legal rights applies to citizens of specific country and some of them applies to country’s visitors that could come to country for touristic or business reasons and have just a temporary visa. Rights such as to work, vote and receive benefits do not apply for visitors of the country, but rights such as access to liberty, freedom, food and drink (which are also a Human Rights) applies to everyone in the country. Citizens have more rights than visitors, because they are residents that live in the country and have that country’s nationality. A lot of initiative and input for Legal rights was introduced by Worker Unions and so called Pressure groups to negotiate a better system for people.

How are Individual and Legal Rights differ from Human Rights?

They are different from Human Rights, because they are not global and are applied only to a particular country. Every country usually have their own set of laws and or rights that country’s government and or leaders has power to create and edit. These laws that can have an effect to citizen rights, citizens and visitors that are in the country. Individual rights cannot clash with Human Rights, because they protect people all around the world and United Nations makes sure that governments don’t violate Human Rights by creating or editing individual rights or laws.

How did Individual and Legal Rights was formed in UK?

When industrial age started in UK, factories needed a lot of people to work for them, but people had no rights at all and got abused by the business owners. Rights that cover areas from employment to health and safety issues. If something happened to them e.g. worker got ill, pregnant or injured in the workplace business owners just replaced workers without giving them a chance to get back to work after they are able to work again or things such as compensation didn’t existed. If you injured yourself – it is your problem to deal with it. Workers decided to form Unions – a groups of workers that act together and stand for one another. One worker didn’t have much of a power and leverage to a business owner, but unions had power and would have cost business owners a lot of money if they decided not to work for him anymore for treating workers badly. This is how unions insisted their rights throughout the years and also these rights had major application and became Individual rights by help of the government. Rights such as Holiday pay – we take for granted, but it didn’t exist before union interference. These early unions were called Trade Unions that are formed out of employees and have their own representatives to defend their rights. These groups became known as Pressure Groups – that goal was to pressure government to create laws for well-being of citizens in the country. These groups become more complex and gained more power with time. They hired lawyers and started to have massive influence in parliament and to everybody. Rights such as Benefits, employment laws, consumer rights, health system (NHS) and pensions are the result of unions.

What is the reason behind Individual and Legal Rights?

By its purpose Individual Rights were created to protect employees and all citizens in general from being treated unfairly by government, other people and businesses. So people are not getting abused with poor pay, poor service, dangerous working conditions and other things that could harm individuals. Individual rights covers areas such as Consumer rights, NHS (a free health care service), benefit systems (childcare, tax credit, jobseekers allowance and others) to ensure well-being of people.

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