Is Public Morality Able to Restrict Human Rights?

Abstract

- Public morality is directly mentioned in several international and regional legal instruments from Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) to the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR). It is intended through public morality reasons a country can restrict the implementation of human rights in its jurisdiction. However, some concerns arise when a state implement these public morality reason, there will be a tendency to benefit the dominant and marginalizing minority parties so that they assume that public morality should not be included as a restriction. UDHR and ECHR use this term in their article. All of these international and regional law instruments stipulate this concept and national authorities use this as the foundation of their claim that there is no universal morality. So their public morality in each country can be the reason to implement these restrictions. Moreover, in some international provisions, it is stated that international or regional mechanisms are only complementary to domestic mechanisms. There are two questions that will be the focus of this research. The first is about whether public morals can be used as a reason for limitation, and the second is about who determines public moral standards as the basis for the limitation. The results of this study are that the protection of public morals can be used as a basis by the state to limit individual rights. Then, because there are no public morals that are universal, which means that public morals in each country are different, the state can issue policies in the form of legal provisions to determine an individual or group of people's actions are not in accordance with or in line with the public morals prevailing in their territory.