Defending Human Rights

     The author's work is based on the assumption that in order to fully understand the issue of human rights, it is necessary to think about the importance of human rights as a legal instrument. It is therefore necessary to first defend the existence of human rights itself and then to focus on defense based on human rights. For this reason, the author is trying to show the source of human rights as the essence of legal order of the Euro-American legal space. These sources are found with the help of parallels between legal theory, evolutionary biology and cultural evolution. At first glance it seems impossible to find any kind of connection between these fields; however, at second glance, which is supported by the author's more than sixteen years of work in advocacy and lifelong interest in natural sciences, these connections are so obvious that it is impossible to miss them. The submitted work is divided into two parts - a theoretical part, in which the issues of human rights with parallels to natural sciences are discussed, and a practical part providing some examples of defense of human rights based on positive-legal regulations of human rights.

     In the first chapters, the author refers to instruments of cultural evolution that she describes as a process that replaced or significantly supplemented biological evolution, which, at a certain point, could no longer keep up with the fast evolution of the human race. The author sees the law as a significant instrument of cultural evolution and a regulator of behavior. The legal standard then as a mem (that is, a quickly spreading piece of information) plays a similar role in evolution as a gene in biological evolution.

     The author then talks about the necessity of cooperation between so-called natural and social sciences, compares the reductionist and holistic way of approaching reality and demonstrates these approaches on a legal background.

     In the third chapter, the author attempts to answer the questions when, from where, how and why the law came into existence. She connects the creation of law and legal standards with the creation of human civilization. This is also when the written law came into existence. The author answers the questions about from where and how with the help of the theory of mems. In her opinion, legal standards are mems.

     The fourth chapter is based on a simple thesis: The higher number of people a certain standard concerns, the more general the standard must be because it must accommodate more opinions. The cardinal question remains, what is the determinant of the content of a standard that is able to accommodate different cultural environments.

     The next chapter is dedicated to the theory of games and concludes that the basic motive of behavior of a human individual is to achieve mutual advantages. This thesis is further developed in the sixth chapter that brands altruism as a manifestation of human selfishness; however, this form of so-called selfishness is in fact beneficial to everyone and is a stabilizing factor for entire regulation and self-regulation of human behavior. The law as a regulator of behavior is only a formulated rule that regulates competing interests of subjects as entities gifted with natural human selfishness. In the seventh chapter, the author returns to the theory of mems and their characteristics. The eighth chapter connects the theory of fractals with the constant and unavoidable expansion of legal standards and concludes that no legislative expansion can fully cover all situations created by the life of human society for systemic reasons. It is therefore necessary to go back to the essence of the law that is expressed in the formulation of human rights and basic freedoms - that is, in different registers of human rights.

     The ninth chapter is an introduction to the practical part describing situations in which the author acted as an advocate in front of the European Court of Human Rights (hereinafter the ECHR). The introduction to individual case studies explains why the work talks only about the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms indicates the correlation between this Convention and the Anglo-Saxon legal system. A list of cases defended by the author is then followed by actual case studies.

The first type of case studies are so-called "father" cases, where fathers are denied contact with their children. These cases are described both chronologically and in respect to changes in the attitude and ruling of the European Court of Human Rights. The first case is the Přemysl Donát case that is described as a clear discrimination of the petitioner - a father and physically handicapped person who is discriminated by rulings of both Czech courts and the ECHR. Another described case is the Evžen Voleský case that became the breaking point and the premise for all following rulings of the ECHR regarding "father" cases. In this case, the ECHR ruled that the right to a fair trial was violated, in particular as to the time limit within which Czech courts ruled. Other described cases are the Václav Kříž case and the Nenad Pedovič case. The last mentioned "father" case is the  Luboš Patera case that was decided by the European Court of Human Rights in March 2007. The mentioned case is interesting in that both Radka Paterová, the wife of Mr. Patera, and L. Patera appealed to the European Court of Human Rights. However, the ECHR ruled differently on both cases, which the author sees as a clear setback for the case law of the ECHR. 

The case study part of the work continues with a description of protection of the ownership right. The right to own property is derived from the biological essence of man and his need to materially secure himself and his offspring. The case of Hutten - Czapská versus Poland regarding regulated apartment rent is analyzed in detail. A similar case that owners of rental apartment buildings are now filing at the European Court of Human Rights is also outlined.

     At the end, the author discusses the importance of human rights, which she sees in the fact that human rights protection cases test the functioning of the entire legal system of the given jurisdiction. Protection of individual petitioners during this testing is just a byproduct of the main role of the application of human rights, i.e. feedback about the functioning or non-functioning of the system. This entire system is based on a biological predestination of the behavior of human society, from which instruments of cultural evolution stem. Even though human rights lose their sovereign humanistic position in the work, they are given a much more important and fundamental role - the role of a "watch dog" of the entire system under which the Euro-American civilization functions.