[QUOTE=Headhumpy;44689953]So by your definition, any state that carries out executions is a serial killer then.
Human rights have three important properties: they are fundamental (simply being a human guarantees you these rights), universal (they apply everywhere) and egalitarian (they apply to everyone). Whether or not you agree with them is irrelevant in the context of international law. They have been agreed upon and defined as such because otherwise, any person or state can simply decide that a certain person or groups of people are in contravention of their definition of the right to exist, and thus subsequently subject them to persecution and extermination. This has happened far too many times in history to bear repeating, but some of the more famous examples are the Holocaust, the Cambodian Genocide, the Rwandan Genocide and the Bosnian Genocide.
To respond to your other point, imprisonment, even for life, is a lesser infringement upon these so-called human rights that we have defined. The major difference is that imprisonment still guarantees that the prisoner can fulfil his basic needs, and, depending on his or her behaviour, can even pursue higher goals such as education and artistic production. To kill someone is to deny them the opportunity to continue with such pursuits, and, as a corollary, to deny the fact that they are a human.
There is also the issue of reversibility. No justice system can guarantee that all convictions are accurate and just. What if we get it wrong and we sentence an innocent man to death? Years down the road, when we find out that we have wrongly convicted him, what are we to do then? We can't bring him back to life. But I guess this is kind of related to your point that you don't trust the justice system. However, I still strongly disagree with your view that human rights are fluid and amorphous. They exist in a very concrete form, and for good reason.[/QUOTE]
Well, I've pondered over it for the past couple days and I can't really disagree with that.
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