During several years there was a misperception about civil and political rights requiring negative duties while economic, social and cultural rights requiring positive duties. If so, the freedom of speech would be guaranteed when the state had left people alone, but the right to health had to be guaranteed by …show more content…
Although it can seem that people who have negative duties, for example, not to harm other people are the one responsible for that, as far as I can see, it is the state which have positive duties to prohibit people from harming each other by establishing laws and rules which need to be enforced to follow.
According to many contemporary scholars and activists the duties are distributed into three main categories: the duty to protect, that requires state to ensure that human rights won’t be taken away from people by third parties, the positive duty to fulfill, that requires the state to make political, economic and social systems accessible for the members of society and the negative duty to respect, that requires the state to keep “hands-off” from the guaranteed human …show more content…
In the first case there will be violation of the Convention in times of inaction from national authorities, and in the second case it will be the prohibition or limitation of exercising the right by positive action. Nevertheless, in some occasions the differences and distinctions between two duties in not clearly expressed regardless of that it never disappears.
During the times when a negative duty collides with positive one, there is a possibility to view the case from either side. The question can be regarding the violation of both or only one of duties. Let’s discuss the cases when the duties coexist or overlap and the cases when there is a question about how to classify