https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
https://guides.ll.georgetown.edu/c.php?g=592919&p=4170926 (which reminds me of the US failure to ratify certain international conventions under which it provides weaker rights)
I'm saying that the rights codified in the USC are inalienable rights. The US government isn't granting the freedom of speech, and it can't take it away. The right exists because you're a human being.
The fact that a country doesn't recognize it as a right doesn't change its status.
Interestingly ECHR doesn't bother to define what a right is or where they come from, leaving the implicit position being simple legal realism that the rights exist because this document says they do and the parties agreed to it. https://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Archives_1950_Convention_...
It's not that the UK is dastardly in violating this person's right to privacy because it doesn't think the rights are worth upholding. It's just that the UK has formulated a particular set of reasonable circumstances where it is alright to violate the right to privacy, and has reasoning behind each of them. The US has a different set of formulated reasonable circumstances where it is alright to violate the right to privacy that much of Europe is pretty horrified about. Both sides being horrified at the borderline areas of the other is not surprising.
That’s a strange take. It is basically a rewriting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. It even says so right there in the preamble. And it’s a law, part of an international treaty, not a history book. So where the origins of these rights are is beside the point and a legal description is not really surprising.
But if you ask them whether 4th-8th amendment rights should extend to detainees at Guantanamo Bay; or whether separation of church and state should be demanded of our Israeli friends; or whether the Queen should be deposed as a tyrant; you would find a lot less support.
(1) Freedom of Assembly, part of our 1st Amendment, is one example.
A French court recently decided a protest in Paris could not take place. The court rationale was that a previous protest a few years ago in the same area on the same issue led to violence and destruction of property.
The French Constitution allows freedom of speech, but not freedom of assembly, and Americans are often confused by that. The freedom to write and say what you want does not equate to the freedom to protest in the streets. Not allowing freedom of assembly would have saved many lives in the protests that have swept the US, though potentially at the cost of slower social progress.
(2) Right to bear arms, our 2nd amendment, is another example.
The vast majority of first-world countries don't agree that the right to bear arms is an inalienable human right in today's society.
As Americans, we may prefer the added protection against government tyranny and our personal ability to protect ourselves and our belongings. Unarguably, however, it comes at the cost of mass shootings, and additionally, though many factors are responsible for our uniquely high homicide rate, easy availability of firearms certainly does not help to curb it.
--- All this to say, many of our protected rights have clear, substantial disadvantages. It's not our place to tell every other country in the world how to operate.
The US supreme court has established that the government can't regulate the content of speech, but the government is in its right to regulate the time, place and manner of speech. [0]
So it is very much a thing in the US and has been enforced plenty of times, for example during Occupy and even during BLM when protests were just declared as "riots" to then crack down on them with the full force of a militarized police arresting thousands of people [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone
[1] https://apnews.com/article/american-protests-us-news-arrests...
Many Americans actually died in these events in addition to dangerous fires (with people still inside buildings!) and random acts of violence, so the riot characterization has at least in some cases been fair. It makes sense thousands of people would be arrested when hundreds of crimes have occurred.
The difference in the US is that these events could not be stopped from occurring, and people were not immediately arrested and water cannoned and so forth by police. It was only after the event grew and escalated and changed in nature.
That is where France differs — a protest can, from the beginning, be declared unable to occur, and police respond to it accordingly.
This is not at all to say that these events were all wrong or created with ill intent, but that there is a clear advantage and disadvantage to the right to freedom of assembly in the US.
I think you are misunderstanding what all of this actually means: The US government doesn't just have to tolerate protests anywhere anytime.
It is in its right to deem certain times, places and forms of expression as not valid, the only thing it can't regulate is the content of the expression.
So you are free to protests for whatever you want, but you are not free to do it whenever and wherever you want, the authorities have the last word on that, regardless of any violence or crimes happening.
In the US, a court won't simply forbid a protest ahead of time because the issue was protested several years ago in the same neighborhood and it led to a riot.
Did they? How many? And of those how many were killed by the police or far-right sympathisers like Kyle Rittenhouse?
But I give you that personal guns being framed as anti goverment tyranny is profoundly us thing. I find out odd also because those guns tend to be stockpiled by pretty authoritarian groups and very rarely by civil rights groups.
It is a subtle issue, but under French law assembling and protesting is covered under free speech, which is a human right.
However, another principle is that all rights are limited when they are in conflict with other people’s fundamental rights, one of them being to live in peace. So in case of protests they have to register beforehand to ensure that there would be some police to prevent violence. That’s the theory anyway. They are not quite as murderous as American policemen, but French ones can also be violent and heavy handed.
For the same reason some protests can be forbidden. Usually, it is very difficult as the local government needs to demonstrate a significant risk of unacceptable violence. It is easier these days (in the last 2 decades or so) since there are “exceptional” measures in force to limit terrorism. And of course now there are public health restrictions because of COVID.
Right to bear arms, our 2nd amendment, is another example.