Towards a Worldwide Index of Human Freedom

Human Freedom from Pericles to Measurement • 39
I will not review other similar charters, such as the Organization
of American States’ Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, African
Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, or the Council of Europe’s
Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.
They have about the same mix as the UN Declaration.
Despite the absence of claim-freedoms from these charters, today such
claim-freedoms seem increasingly common. The United Nations’ (2000)
Human Development Report: Human Rights and Human Development is a
prime example. This report comes up with the remarkable discovery of
seven essential freedoms, printed on the cover page, the inside cover page,
and described inside:
Today, with impressive achievements and a significant unfinished
agenda in human rights and human development, the struggle continues
for realizing and securing human freedoms in seven areas:
• Freedom from discrimination—for equality
• Freedom from want—for a decent standard of living
• Freedom for the realization of one’s human potential
• Freedom from fear—with no threats to personal security
• Freedom from injustice
• Freedom of participation, expression and association
• Freedom for decent work—without exploitation
(United Nations, 2000)
The first, fifth, and the sixth areas are related to negative freedom, or at least
the conditions required for negative freedom,23 the third appears to reflect
a positive freedom, and the rest are claim-freedoms. Many of the classic
examples of negative freedom—assembly, for example—are missing.
This leaves public discourse, as represented by the world’s most important
charters of rights and freedoms, with a mish-mash of negative, positive,
and claim-freedoms, mixed together as if they were all birds of a
feather. This creates real confusion and enables just about any interest
group to declare that the key points of its ideology represent freedom, and
to be able to take that message to the public.
23 Hayek (1960) throughout his work emphasizes the need for an impartial justice system,
or “freedom from injustice,” as a necessary support for freedom. The problem with the
United Nations formulation is that justice is, in fact, justice, not freedom, though it may
be a necessary condition for freedom.
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