17. Human Rights and Ukraine

On the session of the United Nations that took place in 1948, there was accepted the Declaration of Human Rights. It had the greatest influence on the development of the human rights all over the World.

Besides in the Soviet Union there were signed some more international treaties on the human rights, including Agreement on the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Convention on Protection of the Rights of the Child, European Convention on Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. But the interests of the state were above all, even above the life. The Soviet Union even tried not to participate in signing the international legal acts on the Human Rights, but in the case if they had been ratified; all the same they weren't respected.

According to the Ukrainian Constitution, “man and his rights and freedoms shall be supreme value”. Rights and freedoms are declared not only for the citizens of Ukraine, but also for the foreign subjects, and for the stateless persons.

The basic human rights could be divided into three groups. The first is the private rights; the second is political rights and the last one is economic, social and cultural rights. Among the private rights, we could distinguish: the right to life; the right to human dignity; the right to freedom and personal inviolability.

Political, economic, social rights are: the right to private property; the right to elect and be elected to state and local government bodies and to participate in the referendum; the right to the inviolability of private life, personal and family privacy and protection of honour and good name; the right to privacy of correspondence, of telephone and other communications; the right to the inviolability of the home; the right to use native language and to a free choice of the language; the right to freedom and religion; the freedom of thought and speech.

Ukraine is going on a way of becoming lawful state. In comparison with the former Soviet Union, many new civil rights and freedoms already exist in Ukraine.

18. The State and Law

The state has an important part to play in making and enforcing law. It is a political unit with a territory that the international community treats as independent. Law settles how the state is to be governed, what duties it gives its citizens.

Since each state has its own system of law. The laws of states differ a bit but also have much in common. Legal systems are called systems because in each state or part of a state with its own laws there are official bodies concerned with the whole of its law. These bodies — the branches of the state — are the legislature, which makes laws, the executive government, which puts laws into effect, and the judges, who decide disputes about the law. These branches of government try to see that the laws do not conflict with one another. In other words, they treat the laws as parts of a system that hang together.

There are people who believe that there should be no laws at all. These people are called anarchists, but it is difficult to imagine how any society would operate without at least some rules. When items are bought and sold, there must be rules as to what should happen if the item is faulty. When two people marry, some rules are necessary, for example, there should be a minimum age at which they can marry. If they divorce, their property should be divided? In the world of business, laws on a number of points are needed. When you form a company and there should be the rules about contracts and employment.

There is no generally agreed definition of the law of a state, though many legal writers have attempted to define law. A simple definition is that law is a set of rules. Many organizations, however, have rules and there are also rules of morality. Rules become law when they are recognized by the majority of people in a country and applied by the state. A modern society needs laws and the more complex society becomes the more laws it will need.