How often do we hear someone say "Its my right"? It appears to me to be too often and, in fact, usually when it is not his right.

I touched on this in my first article and think it worth a longer study. In that article I said rights do not exist in a vacuum and, before exercising any such right, we must think about the rights of others.

As a pedestrian, I have a right to walk across a road. A driver has a right to drive down that same road. Clearly we cannot both exercise our rights at the same time. Apart from the obvious likelihood of it being said at my graveside that I was dead right to walk in front of the car, why cannot we both insist on our rights? It is because both of us not only have rights but we have duties as well. I have a duty to the driver not to step into his path and he has a duty not to run me down.

It appears to me that frequently when I hear someone assert it is their right to do something, it is on the basis that there is no corresponding right in, and certainly no duty owed to, someone else.

Two recent examples spring to mind. This individual dug a trench in his own land immediately next to a neighbour’s wall, thereby undermining it. On being challenged, he said it was his right to dig up his own land. Of course it is, but not if it damages his neighbour’s property as he, in turn, has a right not to have his wall undermined. Another told me it was his right to conduct himself as he saw fit, even if that meant he committed a crime if that was done by anyone else. I asked him if a Thugee, who believes in killing people, would thus be entitled to kill him. Apparently there are some rights which he was prepared to demand and others deny. Both of these claims to right are obviously untenable and yet were insisted upon.

Society and civilisation require us to recognise that others have rights too and, by our choosing to insist on our rights being upheld, that will have an effect on others. Does it not boil down to not doing to others that which you would not want done to yourself?

The next stage of this is the, usually equally fallacious, assertion that "It is my Human Right" to do something. Human Rights are the product of international convention and statute and the term should not be applied to any other claimed right. They are specific, limited in number and scope and hedged with exceptions and balances. They do not exist in a vacuum. They do not permit an individual simply to assert them without taking into account the rights of others.

Nor are they as clear cut as they may appear to be. The Republic of Ireland was taken to the Court at Strasbourg because divorce was not permitted in Eire. The Human Right contained in Article 12 states that "Men and women of marriageable age have the right to marry..." It was argued that Eire was interfering with this Human Right as the person concerned could not get his divorce, which was an essential preliminary to being able to marry again. It is the last word that caused the argument to fail. Eire was not preventing marriage. It was preventing remarriage and that is not a specified Human Right.

I will climb down off my soap box and leave you with this joke.

For some reason quite unfathomable to me, this lorry driver did not like lawyers. On seeing one, he would simply run him down. On this particular morning he had picked up the priest and the two were chattering away when he spotted a lawyer. He aimed the lorry straight at him but at the last moment remembered the priest was sitting beside him. He swerved violently and stood on the brakes but there was a sickening thud. He got out to find the lawyer lying unconscious on the ground. He apologised profusely to the priest, acknowledging the error of his ways and finished by saying he thought he had missed him. The reply? "You did my son, but I managed to get him with the door."

It is heart warming to be a member of a loved profession.