Civics U: Collective Rights
People’s rights and human rights commonly refers firstly to individual and civil rights. For example, examine just these first five items of the Bill of Rights and the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights.
Bill of Rights:
1st Amendment: Guarantees freedom of religion, speech, and the press, and the
right to assemble and to petition the government
2nd Amendment: Guarantees the right to bear arms
3rd Amendment: Deals with the quartering of troops
4th Amendment: Protects citizens from unreasonable search and seizure
5th Amendment: Guarantees right to grand jury, due process of law…
UN Universal Human Rights:
Article 1 — Right to Equality
Article 2 — Freedom from Discrimination
Article 3 — Right to Security of Person
Article 4 — Freedom from Slavery
Article 5 — Freedom from Inhumane Treatment
These generally establish freedom and protection for individual persons. But even here, the practice of religion, and the right to assemble may inherently involve or require doing so collectively.
At the same time, there are a number of types of group rights or collective rights. And sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between individual and collective rights. For example, if a right to organize is established, such as a right to organize a union and to engage in collective bargaining, on one hand it is the individuals who have a right to organize [or, if instead there is a ‘right to work’, individuals have a right to not join the organization]. But once an organization is formed, whether it is a workers union or a church or a fraternal organization or other, the organization may then have the authority to require or prohibit certain actions or other affiliations on the part of its individual members.
In another context a group of individuals may share membership in a group such as an ethnic, racial, or religious group, and the group may have rights that in other contexts are individual rights – such as freedom from discrimination, or the right to own or inherit property.
Another question arises about what constitutes a “person” before the law. For example, in recent years PACs, Political Action Committees, have been granted the status of a ‘person’, with the right to make donations to political candidates. This has generated some controversy because clearly a PAC can raise and then donate more funds than can an average individual person or citizen.
Treaty Rights
A unique type of group rights are treaty rights held by Native American tribes. In the 1960’s during the civil rights movement, American Indian peoples, while they valued civil rights, were often more concerned with treaty rights. The tribes were concerned about the fact that the United States had broken many of the treaties with tribes. One expression of this concern took place in 1972 in a protest that was called “The Trail of Broken Treaties”, a caravan of Indian people that started on the West Coast and went to the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington, D.C. to dramatize their complaints.
One response to the tribes’ concerns was the passage of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 which strengthened tribes’ right to self-government – a collective right of each respective tribe. Another specific action prior to this was the return of Blue Lake to Taos Pueblo in 1970. This action recognized and reestablished Taos Pueblo’s ownership and rights over land taken from them by the U.S. Forest Service in 1903.
Today tribes’ continue efforts to protect and implement tribal sovereignty. At the same time, fundamental individual civil rights of Indian and non-Indian citizens remain protected by federal law, particularly by the federal Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968. This law, while recognizing the rights and traditions of Indian tribal governments, also protects the basic rights of Indian and non-Indian persons that are contained in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights.