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Sunday, September 18 2022
Human rights involve elements of our existence that are widely deemed to be essential to individual integrity and to our ability to pursue a dignified life. (In the US these are commonly known as constitutional rights.) It is widely thought that no one, including our governments, should interfere with these rights unless they can show why there is a compelling necessity to do so.
There has always been disagreement about which aspects of our humanity should be protected by such basic rights. The well-known lists, such as the US Bill of Rights, generally include rights not to be tortured, or arbitrarily killed, or imprisoned without trial. Other countries also include things such as minimal levels of clean water, nourishment, housing, or education.
Once a list has been agreed most experts insist that we cannot prioritize some rights above others. They argue that all human rights must enjoy an equally high status, because no right can be fully enjoyed unless the others are fully secure. However, I will argue that this assumption makes no sense: free speech must by definition take priority because without it nothing else can even be called a right.
Eric Heinze (Maitrise distinction, U. Paris; J.D. cum laude, Harvard; PhD cum laude, Leiden) became Professor of Law & Humanities at the University of London after publishing his first book entitled Sexual Orientation: A Human Right. He is currently serving as General Rapporteur on the Criminalization of Hate Speech for the Académie internationale de droit compare and was previously the Project Leader for the four-nation EU consortium Memory Laws in European and Comparative Perspectives (2016-19). He has been a Fulbright Fellow (Utrecht), DAAD fellow (Berlin), and Chateaubriand Fellow (Paris), as well as holding grants from the UK Nuffield Foundation and from Harvard University. Heinze has published eight books and has authored or been interviewed for over 150 scholarly and media pieces. His two most recent books are about free speech including The Most Human Right: Why Free Speech is Everything published this past April with The MIT Press, and Hate Speech and Democratic Citizenship published in 2016 with Oxford University Press. He has advised several inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations, including Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists.