Human Rights

• Natural Rights: right to life, liberty and property
• Civil Rights: right to vote, privacy, fair trial, education 
• Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1975: state crime as a violation of people’s basic human rights by the state or its agents. 
• Risse et al 1999: advantage of state crime definition based on human rights that all states care about human rights as these rights are now global social norms which makes states susceptible to ‘shaming’ which can provide leverage for a state to respect citizen’s rights. 
• Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1975: definition of crime inherently political. If we accept a legal definition, we become subservient to the state's interests. Sociologists' role to protect human rights. Example of transgressive criminology 
• Cohen 1996;2001: criticises Schwendingers as gross violations of human rights such as torture are clearly crimes but other acts such as economic exploitation are not self-evidently criminal but morally unacceptable 
• Many disagreements surrounding what counts as a human right (some don’t regard freedom from hunger as a human right) 
• Green and Ward 2012: liberty is not much use if people are too malnourished to exercise it.