This chapter discusses the right to health as it is protected by the European Convention on Human Rights, other Council of Europe instruments, in EU law and in international instruments. Attention is paid to eg access to health care, quality of health care, positive obligations and informed consent. In the final section, a short comparison between the different instruments is made.

The chapter traces the origins of human dignity, showing how it was originally used to denote titles of honor but is now seen as a universal human right or as undergirding universal human rights. In the context of discussing dignity rights, the chapter highlights international human rights treaties and national constitutions making refeerence to the concept of human dignity, which, in modern usage, has to do with the inherent worth of a life. The chapter discusses how human dignity is the foundation for many human rights, including the right to life, the right to be free from torture and other forms of cruelty, and the right to be free of discrimination. The chapter describes existing jus cogens norms prohibiting various acts that violate fundamental human rights, concluding that the death penalty must be abolished because it makes use of credible death threats, inflicts psychological torture, and violates an array of basic human rights. The chapter details how non-lethal corporal punmishments have already been abandoned and how the death penalty has been abolished or curtailed in many countries, with international criminal law tribunals precluding the death penalty's use.

The Conclusion summarizes the book's major themes and arguments, concluding that the death penalty has the immutable characteristics and indicia of torture. The Conclusion asserts that capital punishment violates fundamental human rights, including the right to be free from torture. Non-lethal corporal punishments and mock executions have already been prohibited by law, and the Conclusion asserts that capital punishment should be barred by an existing jus cogens norm--the peremptory norm of international law absolutely prohibiting torture--to stigmatize the practice of capital punishment as a torturous one that has no place in the twenty-first century or in law.

This introductory chapter identifies the key questions, themes and debates addressed within the Handbook on Natural Law and Human Rights, and provides a conceptual overview of and integrated perspective on its contents. In particular, it argues that there is a perennial relationship between human rights and the phenomenon of natural law, which is revealed when we consider how human rights claims can justify the moral demands made on other agents and on the political community. Without prior moral duties – a natural law – human rights claims are impugned by the ‘individualist fallacy’, whereby the potential value of the right to the claimant is presumed sufficient to impose overriding duties, without due consideration being paid to the constitutive social commitments necessary to make that value a matter of common concern and action. The failure to come to grips with this problem, we argue, has led to certain blindspots in contemporary human rights theory and practice. This chapter draws to a close by identifying the key benefits we see accruing from a natural law theory of human rights.

In this chapter, political philosopher Alex Leveringhaus asks whether Lethal Autonomous Weapons (AWS) are morally repugnant and whether this entails that they should be prohibited by international law. To this end, Leveringhaus critically surveys three prominent ethical arguments against AWS: firstly, AWS create ‘responsibility gaps’; secondly, that their use is incompatible with human dignity; and ,thirdly, that AWS replace human agency with artificial agency. He argues that some of these arguments fail to show that AWS are morally different from more established weapons. However, the author concludes that AWS are currently problematic due to their lack of predictability.

This chapter argues for a revised theory of moderate vaccine cosmopolitanism, grounded in a Thomistic natural law interpretation of the principle of solidarity, tempered by the principle of subsidiarity. Solidarity does call for love of neighbour, and therefore for global responsibilities of mutual care among nations. However, love of neighbour does not necessitate equality of treatment and resources, or equality of care and concern. Instead, it necessitates equity: love requires shared yet differentiated duties to care for those in need, according to their needs and our relationships to the most vulnerable. So, love tolerates – and even justifies – some partiality in taking care first of those in one’s own community, without abandoning outsiders to their own luck. This understanding of solidarity is predicated on the idea of equality of dignity – meaning, equal respectful consideration and loving regard among persons and nations. Equality of dignity is consistent with treating, caring, and being concerned with different people in different ways, according to their different needs and their different relationships to us, like the principle of subsidiarity suggests.

The New Natural Law Theory (NNLT) identifies the foundations of ethics in practical principles directing agents to aspects of human flourishing in an all-round reasonable manner. Other normative principles and concepts, including the concept of human rights, are understood in terms of their relationship to human flourishing, and the basic human goods that are constitutive aspects of that flourishing. NNLT thus possesses resources to explain the justification and importance of human rights, as well as the role rights talk plays in the overall economy of moral, political, and legal discourse. In this chapter, Section 2 discusses the logic of rights; Section 3 provides the general foundations for the justification of rights, both human and legal, in considerations of justice and common good. Section 4 looks at the paradigm case of human or natural rights: rights that are absolute and thus already conform to the logical structure of rights identified in Section 2. Section 5 identifies the scope of such rights as including all human beings. Section 6 addresses the relationship between human and legal rights. Finally, Section 7 addresses the metaphysical status of human rights.

We set forth and defend a natural law account of the fundamental dignity of persons. The basis of fundamental dignity--and of the possession of fundamental rights--is being a person: a being with a rational nature. What distinguishes human beings from other animals, what makes human beings persons rather than things, is their rational nature, that is, their having a nature oriented towards enabling them to shape their lives by their deliberate (rational) and free choices. One’s dignity and status as a person derives from the kind of substantial entity one is, namely, a human being, and, as such a creature whose nature is a rational nature. Because personhood is based on the kind of being one is – a substantial entity whose nature is a rational nature – one cannot lose one’s fundamental personal dignity as long as one exists. Although not all persons need be human beings (if, say, there are angels or intelligent Martians, they too are persons), all persons have a rational nature. And so every human being, from his or her coming to be until he or she ceases to be, is a person, and as such a bearer of inherent dignity and fundamental rights.

This chapter reviews Catholic teachings regarding human dignity and how the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) – the official representative of the Catholic hierarchy in the Philippines – has interpreted it in several issue areas, including capital punishment, contraception, poverty, and electoral fraud. Catholic doctrine teaches that all people possess intrinsic dignity because they have been created in the image of God (the imago Dei), thereby imposing certain moral principles regarding the treatment of oneself and others, including solidarity, care for the poor, and the sanctity of human life. The Church’s views have taken on distinct local characteristics shaped by high levels of societal poverty, economic inequality, and corruption, as well as the Church’s historically strong political influence. Catholic bishops have harnessed the concept of human dignity to point out dehumanizing practices in Philippine society and call for greater respect for human life. In recent decades, though, the Church’s moral authority has been severely challenged, revealing the limits of its ability to promote Catholic teachings on human dignity.

As a response to the totalitarian monstrosities of the dehumanization of hundreds of millions of people in the Cultural Revolution, human dignity was enshrined in the Chinese Constitution, not only as a foundational right but also as a basic principle. The basic rights that are necessary to implement this basic principle were all enshrined in the Constitution. China has made notable progress in protecting the nonpolitical dignity of Chinese citizens by means of civil, criminal, and administrative law. However, constitutional principles and rights in China are not justiciable, which together with other factors, such as the nonexistence of a robust tribunal of public opinion, has led to the fact that the political dignity of Chinese citizens – something that is essential to their independence and autonomy — however remains unprotected in practice. There is still a long way to go for China to transform the constitutional dream of inviolable human dignity into a reality.