Priorities among Human Rights

This week, our job is - as you all know - to find the topic of our research papers. In order to find arguments for my topic, I was reading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights again and while reading it, something really interesting came to my mind.

I remember that I read an article about human rights violations that are committed right now all over the world, even in so called developed countries. We all know that this happens and even Germany was sentenced to change some ways in which it deals with high-security prisoners, because the way it was done before was against human rights. The basic idea is that these kind of prisoners, that is to say people who are a high danger for the society and it is likely that they redo their crimes such as rape, mass murder and similar ones, are not released in their freedom but in so called preventive custody. The human rights violation here had something to do with the process after which a prisoner was allowed to be hold in preventive custody.

But do we really think that this violation is on the same level like torturing prisoners or even crimes like genocides? I guess, we can all agree that there is a huge difference between the articles in the declaration but they all need to be followed or obeyed with the same effort. Personally, I believe that this might be one of the most striking reasons why it seems to be so unrealistic and unattainable for one nation to follow all these rules and provide all these rights equally. The only possibility would be to agree on something like different levels of priority among the diverse human rights, because looking at the charter, we can see rights that need to be provided such as article 1 to 12, but also other ones that are either very hard to provide or not unconditionally necessary to have in order to be able to live a decent life, such as article 13 and 21. Of course, I agree that we need to provide every single one of them, but if we had to choose, which one we would violate, there are bad and worse ones.

The point that I‘m trying to make is that I wonder if it would be easier for countries to follow the Human Rights charter, if there were must-haves and can-haves in it.

What do you think about this theory?