In Western discourse, individual rights are commonly assumed to be inversely related to social control. By contrast, much of the recent political discourse on individual rights in China, particularly with respect to due process rights and rule of law, has focused on how protection of individual rights actually makes social control by the government more effective. For example, it has been argued that the people are less likely to violate the law if they believe that the legal system is likely to punish them if they actually violated the law and not punish them if they didn't violate the law. By contrast, if the legal system is arbitrary then an individual has no incentive to actually follow the law.
People who argue that individual rights are more important than social control are called, "individual rights advocates". This school of thought holds that it is better to let a criminal go free; than to execute, imprison, or otherwise punish an innocent person. Advocates tend to argue for increased civil rights. This is traditionally associated with the liberal left-wing philosophy.
Rights are significant only where corresponding duties and responsibilities exist to enforce them - because people must be motivated to undertake these duties and their associated risk (e.g. resisting arrest, fighting back) these rights can normally only be truly enforced by a government that can collect taxes and pay police and court personnel.
Thus, the definition of individual rights is the core responsibility of any modern government. In the United States, the Constitution outlines individual rights within the Bill of Rights. In Canada, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms serves the same function. One of the key differences between the two documents is that some rights in the Canadian Charter can be over-ridden by governments if they deliberately do so, and "the resulting balance of individual rights and social rights remains appropriate to a free and democratic society" after the change. In practice, no Canadian government has actually chosen to face the political consequences of actually over-riding the Charter. In contrast, in the United States, no such over-ride exists, and judicial activism has been the norm in the interpretation of the Bill of Rights.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, and subsequent declarations, established individual rights, in theory, as the basis of international legal norms.
Individual rights can be divided into negative rights (what the government could not do to you) and positive rights (what you are entitled from the society). The constitutional systems of the United States federal government is primarily designed to protect negative rights. The more recent constitutions including those of Western Europe and some U.S. state constitutions include positive rights.
The distinction between negative and positive rights can illustrate the difference between political ideologies. For example, many adherents to libertarian and conservative ideologies believe that the primary role of government is to protect negative rights, and with restrictions on government control the prosperity that is envisioned by positive rights will follow.
Conversely, adherents to socialist and communist philosophies sometimes justify restrictions on negative rights by arguing that their systems are better at delivering positive rights. This justification was popular in the 1950s and 1960s. However in the 1980s, it appeared that judged from their own standard of providing positive rights such as the right to economic prosperity, socialist and communist regimes appeared lacking, and the inability of communist regimes to deliver on their promise of prosperity was one major factor in the collapse of many regimes in the late 1980s.
The justification that economic prosperity overrides negative rights was also used to justify right wing East Asian regimes in the 1960s and is still used by the government of China to justify its political system.
The issue remains unresolved, and such documents as the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights and Convention on the Rights of the Child reflect the "positive rights" view. Conflict between Western nations and the People's Republic of China on "human rights issues" have likewise tended to reflect these differences: the Chinese point to near-universal housing and literacy, despite a lack of "negative rights" that would limit the government's power.
The idea of individual rights is closely related to the idea of individual capital in some theories of political economy, in which the individual enhances his or her own creative capacities (as opposed to measurable productive capacities, which is usually called the theory of human capital), and must remain free to do so in any way she or he sees fit. The most prominent advocate of this approach, called "development as freedom", is economist Amartya Sen. In this view, individual rights have the economic purpose of enabling each individual to optimize his or her capacity to make a unique contribution others cannot make.
More recent human development theory combines this view with a more rigorous ecological economics and means of measuring well-being. Individual rights such as "freedom from toxins" or "freedom to garden", e.g. cultivating hemp, assume a central role in most such theories, and have indeed been upheld in some countries, e.g. Canada in which the individual is recognized as having a right to plant native plants in defiance of any social control, as part of the existing "right of free expression" and "freedom of conscience".
See also: criminal justice, individual capital, human rights, collective rights