There is the ideal of what human rights are (a characterization of this as expressed in this article) and then there is the reality of what human rights are, which is even less than legal conventions--they are mere allowances.
On an intuitively compassionate interdependent level, it ought to be the case that there are some set of "inalienable human rights," that there is something which can ground, say, the gold and silver rules of conduct. Such a foundation, however ethereal it might seem, requires that the individual "gets outside" him or her self: the part needs to vibrate empathetically--come to identify--with the whole, let's say.
The current reality, however, seems mostly framed to deny such a perspective. It favours division over unification, emphasizes the individual over the collective ("survival of the fittest," "dog eat dog," etc.) or emphasizes specific individual collections while de-emphasizing or negating the collection of all such individuated collections (that is, the status quo of almost all specific groups appears to promote and endorse an attitude of "us vs. them"), and, as a result, what is the case is that some individual or, more typically, some small group of select individuals, with power and authority allow others to have what seem as "rights" so long as the granting of these allowances do not interfere too terribly with their power and authority, which is otherwise known as control.
When control faces (what seems to it as) a serious threat by specific "rights" (allowances), those "rights" are either scaled back or removed entirely.
For example, many of us feel we have a "right" to publicly assemble for protest. The reality is that we are allowed to assemble for protest only until such protest becomes a threat to control. When control perceives a threat to its function as control, then we see various levels of response. For example, (1) perhaps laws are created to reduce the "rights" of people to publicly assemble--this could include, for instance, where and when people can and can not gather for protest, and/or (2) perhaps the thugs invested with "legitimate" authority by those in control move in to quell the protest. Such a response could include, for instance, arrests, the use of force, and so on. In extreme instances control will simply remove the individual or individuals it feels most responsible for organizing and perpetuating protest against it: curtailing most or all of the allowances that this particular individual or group of individuals were previously granted.
The pressing question about human rights is much less "what are they" and much more how do we get from what is the case to what ought to be the case: how do we get from allowances granted by those in control to actually existing universal and inalienable rights?
