In modern English and European systems of jurisprudence and law, a right is the legal or moral entitlement to do or refrain from doing something or to obtain or refrain from obtaining an action, thing or recognition in civil society. Compare with duty, referring to behaviour that is expected or required of the citizen, and with privilege, referring to something that can be conferred and revoked. A right is the power or privilege to which one is justly entitled or a thing to which one has a just claim. ... A civet, or sea fox, photographed in the Zigong Peoples Zoo, Sichuan, 2001. ... Manifestations Slavery · Racial profiling · Lynching Hate speech · Hate crime · Hate groups Genocide · Holocaust · Pogrom Ethnocide · Ethnic cleansing · Race war Religious persecution · Gay bashing Movements Discriminatory Aryanism · Neo-Nazism · Supremacism Fundamentalism · Kahanism Anti-discriminatory Abolitionism · Civil rights · Gay rights Womens/Universal suffrage · Mens rights Childrens rights · Youth rights... Civil rights or positive rights are those legal rights retained by citizens and protected by the government. ... The term collective rights refers to the rights of peoples to be protected from attacks on their group identity and group interests. ... Group rights are rights that all members of a group have by virtue of being in that group. ... Human rights are rights which some hold to be inalienable and belonging to all humans. ... The term inalienable rights (or unalienable rights) refers to a set of human rights that are in some sense fundamental, are not awarded by human power, and cannot be surrendered. ... The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view. ... Mens rights is a stream in the mens movement. ... Natural rights is a philosophical hition of universal rights that are seen as inherent in the nature of people and not contingent on human actions or beliefs. ... Within the philosophy of human rights, some philosophers and political scientists see a distinction between positive and negative rights. ... Social rights refer to what are usually positive rights, which ensure to all people a fair standard of treatment. ... The division of human rights into three generations was initially proposed in 1979 by the Czech jurist Karel Vasak at the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg. ... The term women’s rights typically refers to freedoms inherently possessed by women and girls of all ages, which may be institutionalized or ignored and/or illegitimately suppressed by law or custom in a particular society. ... Labor rights or workers rights are a group of legal rights and claimed human rights having to do with labor relations between workers and their employers. ... Manifestations Slavery · Racial profiling · Lynching Hate speech · Hate crime · Hate groups Genocide · Holocaust · Pogrom Ethnocide · Ethnic cleansing · Race war Religious persecution · Gay bashing Pedophobia · Ephebiphobia Movements Discriminatory Aryanism · Neo-Nazism · Supremacism Kahanism Anti-discriminatory Abolitionism · Civil rights · Gay rights Womens/Universal suffrage · Mens rights Childrens rights · Youth... Jurisprudence is the theory and philosophy of law. ... Lady Justice or Justitia is a personification of the moral force that underlies the legal system (particularly in Western art). ... The Politics series Politics Portal This box:      Civil society is composed of the totality of voluntary civic and social organizations and institutions that form the basis of a functioning society as opposed to the force-backed structures of a state (regardless of that states political system) and commercial institutions. ... A privilege—etymologically private law or law relating to a specific individual—is an honour, or permissive activity granted by another person or a government. ...

The specific enumeration of rights accorded to citizens has historically differed greatly from one century to the next, and from one regime to the next, but nowadays is normally addressed by the constitutions of the respective nations. Generally speaking (within the English and European systems) a right corresponds with a complementary obligation that others have on the same object or realm; for instance if someone has a right on a thing, simultaneously another party or parties have an obligation to do something (or to abstain from doing something) in order to respect that right or to give concrete execution to that right. The word citizen may refer to: A person with a citizenship Citizen Watch Co. ... An obligation can be legal or moral. ...

Property rights provide a good example: society recognizes that individuals have title to particular property as defined by the transaction by which they acquired the property granting the individual free use and possession of the property. In many cases, especially regarding ideological and similar rights, the obligation depends on the legal system in its entirety, or on the state, or on the generical universality of other subjects submitted to the law. Property designates those things that are commonly recognized as being the possessions of a person or group. ... Young people interacting within an ethnically diverse society. ... A title is a prefix or suffix added to a persons name to signify either veneration, an official position or a professional or academic qualification. ... As commonly used, individual refers to a person or to any specific object in a collection. ... A state is a set of institutions that possess the authority to make the rules that govern the people in one or more societies, having internal and external sovereignty over a definite territory. ... Lady Justice or Justitia is a personification of the moral force that underlies the legal system (particularly in Western art). ...

The right can therefore be a faculty of doing something, of omitting or refusing to do something or of claiming something. Some interpretations express a typical form of right in the faculty of using something, and this is more often related to the right of property. The faculty (in all the above mentioned senses) can be originated by a (generical or specific) law, or by a private contract (which is sometimes exactly defined as a specific law between or among volunteer parties). A contract is a legally binding exchange of promises or agreement between parties that the law will enforce. ...

Other interpretations consider the right as a sort of freedom of something or as the object of justice. One of the definitions of justice is in fact the obligation that the legal system has toward the individual or toward the collectivity to grant respect or execution to his/her/its right, ordinarily with no need of explicit claim. Mohandas K. Gandhi - Freedom can be achieved through inner sovereignty. ... This article is about the concept of justice. ... This article is about the concept of justice. ... System (from Latin systēma, in turn from Greek sustēma) is a set of entities, real or abstract, comprising a whole where each component interacts with or is related to at least one other component. ...

Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics (book five), claims that there is a large difference between written (generalized) justice and what is actually right for the (specific) individual. Aristotle (Greek: Aristotélēs) (384 BC – March 7, 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. ... Nicomachean Ethics (sometimes spelled Nichomachean), or Ta Ethika, is a work by Aristotle on virtue and moral character which plays a prominent role in defining Aristotelian ethics. ...

(10-3) "But what obscures the matter is that though what is equitable is just, it is not identical with, but a correction of, that which is just according to law."

(10-4) "The reason of this is that every law is laid down in general terms, while there are matters about which it is impossible to speak correctly in general terms. Where, then, it is necessary to speak in general terms, but impossible to do so correctly, the legislator lays down that which holds good for the majority of cases, being quite aware that it does not hold good for all."

"The law, indeed, is none the less correctly laid down because of this defect; for the defect lies not in the law, nor in the lawgiver, but in the nature of the subject-matter, being necessarily involved in the very conditions of human action."

Rights can be divided into individual rights, that are held by citizens as individuals (or corporations) recognised by the legal system, and collective rights, held by an ensemble of citizens or a subgroup of citizens who have a certain characteristic in common. In some cases there can be an amount of tension between individual and collective rights. In other cases, the view of collective and individual rights held by one group can come into sharp and bitter conflict with the view of rights held by another group. For instance compare Manifest destiny with Trail of Tears. The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view. ... The word citizen may refer to: A person with a citizenship Citizen Watch Co. ... Corporate redirects here. ... The term collective rights refers to the rights of peoples to be protected from attacks on their group identity and group interests. ... This painting (circa 1872) by John Gast called American Progress is an allegorical representation of Manifest Destiny. ... This monument at the New Echota Historic Site honors Cherokees who died on the Trail of Tears. ...

With reference to the object of the right, a common general distinction is among:

• Intellectual rights, which include:
  • Civil rights
  • Religious rights
  • Rights of opinion

• Real rights (from the Latin word "res", thing), which include:
  • Property rights
  • Rights of use
  • Liberties

See also: human rights, exclusive rights, negative and positive rights. Civil rights or positive rights are those legal rights retained by citizens and protected by the government. ... Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in Latium, the region immediately surrounding Rome. ... This page deals with property as ownership rights. ... Human rights are rights which some hold to be inalienable and belonging to all humans. ... In law, an exclusive right is the power or right to perform an action in relation to an object or other thing which others cannnot perform. ... Within the philosophy of human rights, some philosophers and political scientists see a distinction between positive and negative rights. ...

Particular systems can (or could in the past) include special rights like:

• Fief rights, which included:
  • Economical rights (like the right to collect taxes)
  • Performance rights (like the jus primae noctis or corvee)

Under the system of feudalism, a fiefdom, fief, feud or fee, consisted of heritable lands or revenue-producing property granted by a liege lord in return for a vassal knights service (usually fealty, military service, and security). ... A tax is a financial charge or other levy imposed on an individual or a legal entity by a state or a functional equivalent of a state (for example, tribes, secessionist movements or revolutionary movements). ... The jus primae noctis meaning law (or right) of the first night, and droit du seigneur meaning the lords right, is the purported right of the lord of an estate to deflower its virgins. ... Corvée, or corvée labor, is a term used in feudal societies. ...

Important documents

• Magna Carta (1215; England)
  • Required the king to renounce certain rights and respect certain legal procedures, and to accept that the will of the king could be bound by law.
• Bill of Rights 1689 (England)
  • Declared that Englishmen, as embodied by Parliament, possess certain civil and political rights that can not be taken away.
• Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789; France)
  • One of the fundamental documents of the French Revolution, defining a set of individual rights and collective rights of the people.
• United States Bill of Rights (1789/1791)
  • The first ten amendments of the United States Constitution.
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
  • An over-arching set of standards by which Governments, organisations and individuals would measure their behaviour towards each other. The preamble declares that the

  "...recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world..."

  • Other general Declarations from the UN have followed, notably the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989 [1].
• European Convention on Human Rights (1950)
  • Adopted under the auspices of the Council of Europe to protect human rights and fundamental freedoms.
• Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982)
  • Its purpose is to protect rights of Canadian citizens from actions and policies of all levels of government.
• Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000)