Although human rights and social rights
often appear to be in conflict from a legal
standpoint, in practice people typically
claim human rights from the basis of a
pre-existing or articulable citizenship right.
Northern Irish oppositional groups who
question the legality of the actions of the
British state in Northern Ireland are already
citizens. The problem with human rights has
been historically that they cannot be (easily) enforced, because there is no political
community to which they can refer or which
they can mobilize. In the absence of a global
state with legitimate juridical powers
around the world that can over-ride state
legislation, it is difficult to see how human
rights legislation can have authority over the
legal rights of citizens of legitimate states.
The problem is in short that human rights
are often not enforceable or in more technical
terminology are not ‘justiciable’. In
more specific terms still, while some jurists
would accept the notion that political rights
could be enforced, the whole arena of the
social and cultural rights of the UN charters
is not justiciable.