For any government, human rights can often be a nuisance. When people protest against breaches of human rights, they bring the actions of the government to scrutiny, try to prevent it from doing what it wants to do, make it rethink its plans and give it a bad reputation abroad.
So the Australian government, unfortunately, is not alone in refusing to endorse a charter of rights, attacking international bodies that criticise its rights record, and enacting laws to insulate its projects from legal challenge.
Activists who protest against abuses of human rights are often criticised as unrealistic and legalistic. Critics accuse them of inventing rights at a drop of a hat to suit their case.
They also point out that many states that offer the strongest legislative protection of human rights often respect them least in practice.
Although they can be inconvenient and provoking, human rights matter. It is important for nations to recognise them and for citizens to defend them. The survivors of the Second World War who had seen the gross violations of human rights under both Nazi and Communist regimes clearly saw this. These states regarded human rights as a privilege that they could give and take away as they chose. History spells out in the alphabet of gas chambers and gulags what that attitude meant for their subjects.
The recognition that governments will always be tempted to regard human rights as expendable has inspired committed people to defend them. We celebrate their work this week, on international Human Rights Day (10 December), which insists that all human beings have rights simply by being human, not by being right-thinking, amenable or of the right religion, race and political persuasion. The state does not create rights. Nor may it take them away.
This message is particularly important in times of anxiety, like our own, when governments are under pressure from their people to provide perfect security whatever the cost. The promise of total security is illusory, but the cost is real. It usually involves showing systematic disrespect for groups of society, stripping away rights to privacy and to equal protection under the law. Public relationships that are originally designed to ensure respect for people are skewed to encourage disrespect.
The enumeration of human rights is simply a way of spelling out the conviction, always precariously held in society, that each human being is precious and demands respect. The different rights are not arbitrarily invented but