People’s Rights

People’s Rights

The rights of the people can be categorized in multiple ways. A considerable number of them fall in more than one category; however, it depends on the law governing the nation and, at times, the perception of individuals. The widely employed categories of these rights are civil rights, natural rights, and human rights. The write-up will, therefore, review a newspaper article that revolves around one of the people’s rights, and subsequently highlight whether the discussed right can act as a presentation topic in a history class.

Question 1

Johnson, Kirk. “Court Defines Tenant Right as ‘Property’.” The New York Times, 8 Mar. 1987, p. 7.

Question 2

The article by Johnson highlights the commencement of legal law in the 1980s, whereby prosecutors believed that an apartment leased by a tenant, although intangible, it is his property. It was seconded by the courts and the district attorneys, with their argument being, leasing transfers the exclusive and sole rights of the premise from the landlord to the tenant, and the interest constitutes a property whether transferred or not. According to specialists and officials concerned with housing, unlawfully evicting a tenant would lead to criminal charges to the landlord, which could fall under class D felony or worse, class C felony – punishable to up to 15yeras of imprisonment.

Question 3 and 4

The article has directly or indirectly highlighted several rights that are violated when tenants forcefully evict a tenant. In the natural rights, civil rights and human rights, the specific rights violated are right of liberty, right to housing and right to privacy, correspondingly. The first right is evident in the following statement “a landlord or building manager who forcibly evicted a tenant through threats or acts of violence could be charged with the crime of coercion.” The right to housing, which protects an individual from discrimination such as eviction, is explained in the second paragraph “… has increased the potential penalties for landlords and building managers who use violence or threats to force tenants out of their apartments…”. A tenant’s privacy is disturbed when the landlord decides to break in the house and steal the property, which was commented by the prosecutors indirectly “…actually stealing property and committing grand-larceny, or extortion, or both”

Question 5

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “right” in two perspectives. First, as a legal claim to freedom and secondly, what individuals are legally entitled to. The first definition is highly linked to the right of liberty, because liberty is a person’s freedom of freewill. Whereas the second definition has a strong relationship with the right of housing and the right to privacy. It is due to that people are entitled to privacy, and its the government’s responsibility to cater to discrimination in the housing sector.

Question 6

the script by Johnson focuses on the right to property. This right can be an ideal presentation topic due to it being intricate and ambiguous. The right to property differs extensively in diverse legal systems, therefore not possible to institute international guidelines on it. Activists in Africa, America, and Europe have varying degrees of how they recognize the protection of the right to property. Controversies majorly emerge in deciding who is protected; firms or people, type of property protected; for production or consumption, and reasons for protecting; public interest, regulation, among others. Conferring to these aspects, this right is subjected to many limitations and qualifications as it can fall under the natural, civil, or human rights. According to John Locke, an English Philosopher, right to the property belongs to the natural rights as it is inalienable to the right to life. However, Friedrich Engels and socialist Proudhon equate property to theft. In recent times, the members of the EU understand the property to belong to society.

Furthermore, the controversy of this right is evident in many evolutionary events that led to grave suffering and genocides. For instance, slavery in America where people were viewed as property, and Apartheid regime where more than three million people were forced out of their ancestral lands. Also, China’s Great Leap Forward, that caused the death of roughly 20 million people because of using household utensils for collective motives.