The distinction between classical and socioeconomic rights can be unhelpful.
Seven years into the French Revolution, the then ruling Directory arrested, tried and eventually guillotined a man with the stirring name of Gracchus Babeuf (he'd taken a new first name after the ancient Roman republican group). In the "Conspiracy of Equals", Babeuf was guilty of plotting to bring down the government, and violently too. He admitted all that, and the blade fell on him on May 12 1797.
Yet Babeuf's views struck many of the notes we are still hearing in discourses on human rights – including those we celebrate in South Africa on the anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre, March 21. For Babeuf, and his later followers (called Babouvists), the French Revolution did not go far enough. Yes, it abolished the feudal forms of inequality that gave power to one class and reduced others to near-slaves, but what about equal access to economic goods, including property? If human rights are only political rights, warned the Babouvists, they will be "illusory as far as the masses are concerned, sunk as they are beneath the level of human dignity".
This is not too far from Julius Malema's "economic freedom" rhetoric. It also echoes the "socioeconomic rights" on the agenda of progressive NGOs, and even forecasts service-delivery riots.
In fact, the distinction between classical and socioeconomic rights can be unhelpful. At Marikana, Zamdela and Daveyton, we saw what happens when an armed state confronts a populace insisting on its socioeconomic rights: basic human rights are quickly put to the sword. In the Protection of State Information Bill and the General Intelligence Laws Amendment Bill, we can see what happens when a paranoiac state confronts a society increasingly questioning its legitimacy. Freedom of speech, privacy and dignity come quickly under threat.
Human rights in their broad and interdependent sense must be the lodestar of both development and security policy. To forget that is to forget who we are.