You are not currently logged in. Please create an account or log in to view the full course.
Civil and Political Rights: Definition and Context
- About
- Transcript
- Cite
Comparative Politics – Civil and Political Rights
In this course, Dr Andrew Blick (King’s College London) compares and contrasts the protections of civil and political rights in the UK and in the US. In the first module, we are introduced to the topic of civil and political rights, and begin to explore some of the complexities around their definition and realisation in practice. Then, in the second module, we explore the legal and constitutional protections extant for rights in the UK, before moving on in the third module to unpick the corresponding situation in the US. In the fourth module, we explore the significance of the different constitutional arrangements in the US and UK, particularly the implications of codified and uncodified constitutions, before moving on in the fifth module to compare and contrast the relative power and significance of the UK and US Supreme Courts. In the sixth and final module, we explore the recent history of rights protections in the US and UK, focusing in particular on key developments such as the ongoing controversy in the US over abortion rights and the overruling of Roe V Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organisation (2022), and the UK government's early attempts to alter the Human Rights Act and restrict the power of judges following the Brexit controversy. This course is particularly relevant for the comparative element of the AQA and Edexcel A Level Politics specifications, and for those interested in UK and US politics more generally.
Civil and Political Rights: Definition and Context
In this module we introduce the concept of civil and political rights as it applies to politics in the US and the UK, focusing in particular on: (i) how civil and political rights may be defined; (ii) the difficulties we face in reaching agreement on what these rights are and how to realise them in practice; (iii) the emphasis placed historically on civil rights defined as protections from abuse, particularly by governmental institutions; (iv) the political right to partake in political processes; (v) some examples of political rights, e.g. freedoms of expression, movement, protest and association; (vi) the history of the development of civil and political rights.
Hello, I'm Andrew Blick,
00:00:06professor of politics and contemporary history at King's College.
00:00:07London rights are a very important concept in politics.
00:00:11When we talk about rights, we mean the things to which all people,
00:00:16irrespective who they are, are entitled.
00:00:22And often we use the term human rights that there
00:00:24are thing to which all humans should have access,
00:00:27in an equal sense that there are certain basic things that we
00:00:31need to be able to have preserved and protected for ourselves.
00:00:35I have access to
00:00:38and we should all have that regardless of who we are,
00:00:40realising that concept in practise is obviously complicated.
00:00:44And there's also ways of distinguishing between different kinds of rights.
00:00:50For instance, some people might say you have a right to housing right to a job,
00:00:56a right to health,
00:01:02a right to a clean, um, environment. Those are what we might call
00:01:04economic and social rights that we should have an access to resources or some level.
00:01:08We're all entitled to certain basic fundamentals of life or environmental
00:01:13rights that were actually all entitled to have some kind of
00:01:18livable environment free from pollution with
00:01:21access to water and other other important
00:01:24needs
00:01:27the kind of rights we're talking about in
00:01:28today's talk are what we call civil and political rights.
00:01:32They fall into a general category
00:01:37with that label.
00:01:40What do we mean by civil and political rights?
00:01:42As I said,
00:01:45the rights which are regarded more socioeconomic
00:01:46rights that involved the right access to things
00:01:50to material well being that we need when we talk about civil and political rights,
00:01:52we're talking more about the right to be protected from abuse by,
00:01:58particularly by governmental institutions
00:02:04and also the right to take part in political processes.
00:02:07So
00:02:14when I when we talk about the right to protection,
00:02:15we mean things like the right not to be tortured
00:02:19the right to a fair trial,
00:02:23not just to be arrested and thrown into prison without some kind of
00:02:25due process being followed
00:02:29the right not to be
00:02:31searched by by, for instance,
00:02:33by police without there being a good reason for the police doing so,
00:02:36those kind of protections from abuse.
00:02:39And when I talk about the right to take part in political processes,
00:02:42I mean the right to access exercise our roles as participants in democracy.
00:02:48Those kind of rights involved things like freedom of expression,
00:02:56the right to say what we think or write what we think about, for instance,
00:02:59government to criticise government,
00:03:04to promote a particular party of promoting a particular viewpoint.
00:03:07That's for your expression also freedom of movement,
00:03:11the right to go to different places within the country,
00:03:14the right to travel around without being challenged
00:03:17and freedom of protest.
00:03:20The right to disagree with government, the right perhaps to go on a demonstration
00:03:23and freedom of association which could mean the right to join a political party,
00:03:27the right to join a trade union, the right to organise in some way politically,
00:03:34perhaps to do
00:03:38a pressure group.
00:03:39All of those kind of rights are important both to being protected against abuse
00:03:40and also to take part in the political process.
00:03:45And without them, we would be less of a what we might term a free society,
00:03:49their fundamental parts of what would be regarded as a democracy.
00:03:55All of those rights are important. They're widely accepted as being important.
00:04:02They've had a long period of development, particularly from the late 18th century.
00:04:06The American War of Independence and the French Revolution
00:04:12started developed these ideas that humans had rights.
00:04:17Obviously, their realisation in practise has been a lot more complicated,
00:04:20as is well known in America.
00:04:25Although there was talk about rights,
00:04:28there is also a large chunk of the population who were slaves
00:04:29or women or people for other reasons didn't have those rights.
00:04:33So rights being talked about doesn't mean
00:04:37that they're actually being realised in practise.
00:04:39But over time they develop the more means of
00:04:42protecting them and promoting them have come about.
00:04:45And they've been extended to some extent in some countries
00:04:48after the Second World War and all the
00:04:52terrible things that happened during that period,
00:04:55there were there was the introduction of a series
00:04:58of international treaties designed to promote human rights,
00:05:02including the civil and political rights I was talking about earlier.
00:05:06So we have documents like the United Nations Declaration
00:05:09of Human Rights and also at European level,
00:05:14the European Convention on Human Rights.
00:05:17So there are various means by which these kind of concepts are protected at
00:05:19international or regional level,
00:05:25and also which is what I'm going to get onto in this
00:05:27talk by which they are realised at the level of individual states,
00:05:30including the UK and the United States,
00:05:35
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Blick, A. (2022, October 24). Comparative Politics – Civil and Political Rights - Civil and Political Rights: Definition and Context [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/comparative-politics-civil-and-political-rights
MLA style
Blick, A. "Comparative Politics – Civil and Political Rights – Civil and Political Rights: Definition and Context." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 24 Oct 2022, https://massolit.io/courses/comparative-politics-civil-and-political-rights