Nature and Scope of the Right to Life: Taking Human Rights from Rhetoric to Reality

The relative superiority of the right to life is a well-recognised fact in human rights jurisprudence. This paper shows that the right to life is the normative expression of the abstract notion of human dignity, which is arguably the basis of human rights. The right to life is also the only right to which every other human right can necessarily be shown to have dependency. Thus the right to life is the summery of the whole human rights discourse. The human right of the right to life often acts as a redeemer where bills of rights are deficient in the realization process. Therefore the scope of the right to life may be extended as far as human rights can go. The yard stick here can be the reference to inherent human dignity, which is the extra legal justification of human rights.