B.1(a). Categories of Rights

This Charter recognizes three categories of Rights: Natural Rights, Civil Rights, and Civic Rights.

Natural Rights are the basic freedoms that every human being has simply by being alive. No government grants these Rights, and it is illegitimate for any government to deny them.

Civil Rights are legal protections that apply to all Persons under the law. Civil Rights give force to Natural Rights and guarantee fair and equal treatment under the law. They also protect Persons from abuse of power by the government.

Civic Rights are the exclusive Rights of Citizens.

This Charter assumes that all people are equal and have certain rights simply by being living humans. These are called natural rights, and they pre-exist government. They are the rights the Preamble references. But natural rights are a philosophical and moral concept. Preserving them is the reason that the government exists, but they have no legal weight on their own.

Civil rights, on the other hand, carry legal weight. Every person in the United States, whether they are a citizen or not, is guaranteed civil rights. Civil rights are the specific provisions, even if only implied, that give legal force to the philosophical natural rights. (The specific civil rights guaranteed to all persons are detailed in Article I, Section 2.B.2) A way to think of this is that we know we are entitled to certain protections, freedoms, and treatment just by being alive. To give those protections, freedoms, and treatment legal weight, we create laws that apply to everyone, which we call civil rights.

There is a third category of rights. These are tied to citizenship. If there are governments in the world (and there are), they will allow or prohibit certain things. When they do that based on citizenship, they can end up denying natural rights, which is illegitimate. For example, when you’re a citizen of one country, you (usually) can’t claim citizenship protections from others. So civic rights protect American citizens from the vulnerabilities that come with this exclusive relationship, like being left stateless or denied re-entry to their own country. Their civic rights are the legal rights they get for being American citizens. (These civic rights are detailed in Article I, Section 2.B.3)

Together, these form a threefold theory of rights that prevails throughout the Charter.