Right to self determination

Human rights are the rights enjoyed by an individual by virtue of being born as a human being. These are those basic, fundamental rights, without which the mere human existence would be difficult. These are essential for the overall development of an individual and include certain basic rights like the right to life and personal liberty, right to food and adequate standard of living and so on. Human rights can be classified into individual’s rights and collective rights. While the individual’s rights can be enjoyed by a single individual, an individual can benefit from collective rights only in a group. The collective rights, also known as the third generation rights are available to certain groups of individuals and include rights such as right to development, right to a protected environment, right to self determination or the physical protection of the group as such through the prohibition of genocide.

The right to self determination is the right of a group of individuals to decide their political status. It is applied to the colonial people, those belonging to trust territories and non governing territories.  The principle is regarded to be fulfilled for the trust territories, either, by self government or independence and for non self governing territories by either emerging as sovereign and independent state or free association with an independent state or integration with another state.

Para I of Article I of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as of the International Covenant  on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights lays down that all people have the right to self determination. The wordings are identical in both the Covenants and stand as:

All peoples have the right of self determination. By virtue of that right they freely, determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.

The principle of self determination does not extend to the people of an integral part of a sovereign state and thus, they do not possess the right to self determination because the exercise of such a right by them would result in secession. The right to self determination cannot be invoked by any section of the people of any part of the country on the basis of the stipulation in the Covenant.

Thus, the right of self determination is the basic right of a group of individuals belonging to a non sovereign territory to determine their political status.