As far as I know the US is the only country with enumerated rights for citizens. “Human rights” are discussed in international contexts but don’t seem to have any legal basis on the local level.
I appreciate that you prefaced this with a disclaimer about your ignorance, but it has a weird tone of American exceptionalism to it, and it’s not even close to true. There are quite a lot of countries with “bills of rights”. There’s even a Wikipedia article that attempts to enumerate them.
> Everyone has the right to life, personal liberty, integrity and security.
> No one shall be sentenced to death, tortured or otherwise treated in a manner violating human dignity.
> Everyone's private life, honour and the sanctity of the home are guaranteed.
> The secrecy of correspondence, telephony and other confidential communications is inviolable.
> Everyone has the freedom of religion and conscience.
> Everyone has the freedom of expression.
> Everyone has the right to arrange meetings and demonstrations without a permit, as well as the right to participate in them.
> Everyone has the freedom of association.
> Those who cannot obtain the means necessary for a life of dignity have the right to receive indispensable subsistence and care.
From my point of view America is exceptional because their rights are often part of political discourse in a way that I don’t see at home or in my limited exposure to other domestic politics.
Think about "liberté, égalité, fraternité".
Every political party in every country invokes civic rights in their discourse because it makes for a great rhetoric.
In more autocratic countries human rights might be a much bigger part of political discourse because there are more violations.
The rights being discussed in the article sounds like rights nominal protected by Russian law. So really the question is 'do rights the government grant you count, if that government ignores them?'. In a properly functioning liberal democracy, the answer is 'yes, because there is a co-equal branch of the government (the judiciary) that will not ignore them'. In a country where all aperatasus of the government agree not to respect those rights, then all you have is paper.
It's back on the table for discussion [1] but it would probably take a serious event to push this in one direction or the other I think. Probably nudging it in the requirement direction is the lack of physically qualified candidates. I have no idea what direction this will ultimately go.
I have proudly served along side women in the US military and witnessed them performing all the duties expected of them not in combat. How random male and female conscripts would be allocated in warfare by the US remains to be seen and I do not know to what extent they have tested this idea. I have sparred with female fighters outside of the military and would be afraid to meet them in battle but these were not random conscripts and in my humble opinion are not very common.
[1] - https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/06/27/requirement-w...
Congress almost did so, to the point where both houses of Congress approved a draft bill that would; however the provision was dropped before a final version was agreed to.
For a country that has not had a draft in half a century, that is a suprising level of controversy.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/20-928_new_i4ek....
The historical background is that serving in the military is what able-bodied male citizens do in a republic. Conscription is not supposed to be something that the government does but what the citizens do by the virtue of being citizens. If there is no conscription, you don't have a republic in the traditional sense, because warfare is no longer a public matter.
there are rules in russia about how conscription/etc works. medically fit, mentally stable, etc. ever since they started mobilization they just rubber stamp paperwork that says that they are fit without any medical examination
just an example
There are international treaties that are incorporated law - e.g. the European Convention on Human Rights. How effective they are varies with national governments (Russia and Turkey are both ECHR, for example). The big variable is whether a country has an independent judiciary that will enforce those rights.
There are definite rights listed in very old laws such as the Magna Carta - and I have read that much of what it granted was already accepted in common law.
So, the person quoted in the article has at least some grounds for arguing about human rights, although you might consider the grounds fairly weak. I furthermore claim that the only compassionate response is to agree even if the person isn't on the strongest ground in a formal legal sense where someone might actually be able to do something about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Charter_of_Rights_and...
And the USA has legal conscription as well (at least could), even with enumerated rights.
I firmly believe that if even any so-called democratic government wants to do something nominally illegal to you they will find a way. Maybe in a so-called democratic country decades later you’ll be exonerated or the perpetrators will be punished but that won’t be much help to you.
No single branch of government is all powerful. In fact, it is a testament to the strength of the constitutional republic the founders built, that even with a man like Donald Trump abusing his powers and a media bolstering his lies, ultimately he was forced to step down, and though justice is slow, he is finally seeing justice for his many crimes.
The Supreme Court rulings can’t be contested except by the Supreme Court.
See: Worcester v. Georgia
This is one of the problems with a Supreme Court that is making rulings that the majority of people don't agree with. If the Supreme Court loses its legitimacy and the other branches simply start ignoring it, it will take a lot of work to get any power back.
My point is, however, that one man alone cannot be strong enough to bring it all down. There is enough distribution of power for the system to be robust. By irony, the very political tribalism which is ubiquitously hated and lamented by pundits itself creates a sort of political competition; there is very high incentive to hold the other party or incumbent(s) accountable when they abuse their power or make mistakes, as this benefits themselves politically. Of course, the downside to this system, as we've witnessed in recent years, is that both parties are quick to criticize the other side for their sins, but once in power they commit the very same sins with no self-awareness of the hypocrisy. Although, I wonder how much of that is due to McConnell and the GOP's loose morals, vs. the GOP itself being nigh unrecognizable from what it once was. The party of Reagan, Bush, and Romney is no more; the latter of which I was just reading, described in the press as a "pariah within his own party."
The system they set up has far too much ambiguity and survives only as long as honorable people are in the correct places at the correct times and _just_ barely enough were, this time, to prevent it all from completely crashing down.
> [...] ultimately he was forced to step down, and though justice is slow, he is finally seeing justice for his many crimes.
I mean I'll take it, but he's only being prosecuted for a small fraction of the shit he did, even if we ignore his whole life before the presidency. Our justice system has been openly corrupted by the rich and the powerful.
Imagine how US would have looked like if South had won the previous civil war.
A genius of the US Constitution is that it states unequivocally that citizens grant rights to their government, not the other way around.