This chapter examines the link between rights and responsibilities, duties or obligations. If people are assumed to have rights, these can be seen as implying certain corresponding obligations, on the part of both the state and individuals, to ensure that those rights are protected and realised. These need to be examined in some detail as they have significant implications for a social work practice that assumes a human rights perspective. We will first examine the idea of the responsibilities of the state, or of some other civic body, which result from the acknowledgement and affirmation of human rights.

The erosion of the state

It is clear that human rights impose some obligation on the state to ensure that those rights are respected, protected and realised. But before examining how this can be achieved, and its implications for social work, we need to examine the problematic role of the state in contemporary society. The ‘crisis in the state’ is a recurring theme in the social policy literature, and there is a substantial literature on the more specific ‘crisis in the welfare state’, which is particularly significant as it is the welfare state that has been seen as having the primary responsibility for ensuring the meeting of human rights, especially second-generation rights (Bryson 1992; Burrows & Loader 1994; Saunders 1994; Good in et al. 1999; Mishra 1999; Rodger 2000).