Negative and positive rights
rights that oblige either inaction or action
Negative and positive rights are rights that oblige either inaction (negative rights) or action (positive rights). These obligations may be of either a legal or moral character. The notion of positive and negative rights may also be applied to liberty rights.
Negative rights may include civil and political rights such as freedom of speech, life, private property, freedom from violent crime, protection against being defrauded, freedom of religion, habeas corpus, a fair trial, and the right not to be enslaved by another.
Positive rights, as initially proposed in 1979 by the Czech jurist Karel Vašák, may include other civil and political rights such as the right to counsel and police protection of person and property. Additionally, they may include economic, social and cultural rights such as food, housing, public education, employment, national security, military, health care, social security, internet access, and a minimum standard of living. In the "three generations" account of human rights, negative rights are often associated with the first generation of rights, while positive rights are associated with the second and third generations.
Under the theory of positive and negative rights, a negative right is a right not to be subjected to an action of another person or group such as a government, usually occurring in the form of abuse or coercion. Negative rights exist unless someone acts to negate them. A positive right is a right to be subjected to an action of another person or group.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Negative and positive rights” is rights that oblige either inaction or action. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Negative, positive and rights, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3519619. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1979.
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This entry incorporates text from “Negative and positive rights” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.