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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think it’s silly to suggest that maybe all humans should have the same protections against their rights being violated.

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Not everyone gets the same rights. That's why we have the word "citizen", and why citizens get different legal status. One of those rights is the right to vote. Are you saying you think anyone should be able to vote in the elections of whatever country they want? That seems pretty silly.

No, I don’t think everyone ought to have the right to enter my house at night time either, but my point does not collapse to such absurd suggestions. I was, of course, referring to the phrase “the people” in the text of the fourth amendment. I hope I don’t sound too silly suggesting that the right to not have property searched and seized unreasonably is not something that ought to depend on which country you were born or have gained citizenship in.

I do agree, but that's not what you wrote before. You wrote that "all humans should have the same protections against their rights being violated", which implies you think everyone should have the same rights. This clearly doesn't make sense, as I pointed out about voting rights. The bottom line is, not everyone has the same rights. Citizens of any country have more rights than non-citizens; there's nothing abnormal about this. You can argue that certain rights should extend to everyone (and I would agree), but this argument seems to have some disagreement about whether unreasonable-search-and-seizure is a right that should only be afforded to citizens or not, and I'm just pointing out that non-citizens don't get all the same rights as citizens.

Good news: none of the Bill of Rights are limited to citizens, and most are indeed broadly worded so that citizenship status is not a threshold requirement for the right to apply.

Depends on what you consider a "right" to begin with, which brings us full circle. I think some things are easy and most reasonable people will agree on (like here) but there are many which aren't so clear cut.

> I don’t think it’s silly to suggest that maybe all humans should have the same protections against their rights being violated.

Don't different countries have different views of rights? What happens when those rights are at odds? For example, Turkish people can't speak ill against their governments [0]. This contrasts with countries that have fewer restrictions on speech, like America.

So I think the main issue is, how can all humans have the same protections if different jurisdictions protect different things?

Or is "protections" here more about procedural rights?

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_301_(Turkish_Penal_C...

> Don't different countries have different views of rights?

And so they would apply their views in their own jurisdiction.

> What happens when those rights are at odds?

Whichever jurisdiction you stand in correspond to the rights that prevail for you.

The way I see it, a country says what the rights of people/humans are, and they defend those beliefs in their own jurisdiction, where they have the absolute power to.

> So I think the main issue is, how can all humans have the same protections if different jurisdictions protect different things?

I think baddox's comment does not necessarily imply all humans in the world. I interpreted it as all humans in a given jurisdiction.

> I think baddox's comment does not necessarily imply all humans in the world. I interpreted it as all humans in a given jurisdiction.

Ah I had not thought of it in this way but that makes sense. I can't disagree that all people in a single jurisdiction should be afforded the same procedural rights (I couch it in procedural rights because substantive rights are stripped from felons for example in many jurisdictions).

What is your argument here? The fact that human rights are not respected in all countries doesn't mean that humans don't have rights.

It means that we can't agree on the list to begin with, and it's not always cut and dry.

I’m sure the people didn’t get together in a referendum and decide to be not-allowed to criticize the government. That’s not a matter of not agreeing, it’s a matter of being told

And in between tyranny and the right of free speech (which not even all modern countries agree on I would add) there's a whole lot of gray. For example, is healthcare a right? How about voting for felons?

It doesn't make sense to extend the right to vote to tourists, for one. I could imagine a flood of tourists at election time from certain countries.

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