Justice & Law Quote by Rene Cassin

Cassin’s phrasing reads like a legal brief with a moral fuse: rights are not ornaments, they are operational necessities. By calling economic, social, and cultural guarantees “corollaries” to life and “full participation,” he’s doing something quietly radical. He’s refusing the comforting fiction that civil and political liberties can stand alone, as if the vote, speech, or due process mean much to someone shut out of work, education, housing, or cultural belonging. The sentence turns “the right to work” from a policy preference into an implication of human dignity: if society recognizes you as a rights-bearing person, it has to recognize the material conditions that make that status real.

The subtext is aimed at an old argument dressed up as common sense: that negative rights (freedom from interference) are “real” rights, while positive rights (entitlements to conditions) are soft aspirations. Cassin, a jurist shaped by the wreckage of war and the project of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is staking out the opposite. He’s saying the postwar order cannot be rebuilt on abstractions alone; democratic membership requires economic footing and cultural access, not just formal equality.

Notice the strategy: no soaring rhetoric, no sentimental appeals. He leans on the language of logical necessity, the lawyer’s weapon. If life and participation are rights, then work and social protections follow. Not because the state is benevolent, but because rights, taken seriously, have consequences.