Introduction

Numerous appeals to human dignity in legal texts and jurisprudence, strongly marking the global development of law after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948 (hereinafter the UDHR), are an evident fact. However, the manifold context in which the law calls forth dignity, as well as different legal effects that human dignity is considered to have, may appear puzzling indeed. To make a terribly long story terribly short: in certain cases, human dignity is considered the source of rights (e.g. Article 30 in the Constitution of the Republic of Poland); in others, it is proclaimed explicitly as a separate right itself (as in Article 5 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights). The normative content of this right, however, is ambiguous. Whereas sometimes it protects the individual against the interference of the state such as degrading treatment or infringements of privacy, under certain conditions it obliges the state not only for restraint but for certain actions to sustain the dignity of its citizens, in the context of social law (Daly 2013, 54–65). As a regulative principle, sometimes it is used to justify extending individual freedom and autonomy, on other occasions, it restricts the sphere of choices concerning one's occupation, for example. The panorama becomes even more complex if we recall that dignity appears also in torts, or labour law, as a protected private interest. All this calls for sorting out, but perhaps before any sorting out can be attempted, one should ask a more fundamental question: is human dignity something real and legally relevant? In other words: is there one common point of reference that matters for different legal applications, within and across jurisdictions? Is it possible to unify contingent legal discourses in reference to one ideal or principle? This chapter addresses these questions and provides grounds for answering them in the affirmative.

We should bear in mind, however, that the opposite answer is also widely represented: according to some, the best solution for the puzzles of dignity would be to abandon interpreting it as legally relevant, especially as bearing a concrete legal effect. Those scholars seem to suggest that while the appeal to human dignity might express some of our ethical aspirations, it does not bear much more than blurry, inconsistent intuitions when applied to the legal sphere (Hennette-Vauchez 2007).