Human Rights and Self-Determination in Residential Care Facilities: Concepts and Challenges

Abstract

Human rights arise from human vulnerability. They are guaranteed through communal agreements. Residential care facilities must take as their main objective the realization of human rights, given they represent the locus where the communal agreement to reinforce the guarantee of human rights for those with salient vulnerabilities is translated into practice. Meanwhile, human rights cannot be separated into parts, nor can some of them be prioritized over the others. Also, they are interdependent and interrelated. The right to self-determination shares the indivisibility, interdependency, and interrelatedness of human rights. Such is the reason why no individual’s right to self-determination can be restricted on the grounds of the protection of that individual in a residential facility setting. Nor ought the protection of the individual be forsaken for the sake of safeguarding the right to self-determination. Inasmuch as the line of demarcation that sets off those living in residential care facilities closely mirrors the arbitrary line defining the rational, reasoning agent that self-determination presupposes, the right to self-determination becomes a fundamental problem that the residents come to confront from the moment they are placed in these facilities. Residential care facilities must be committed to ensuring that their residents have not only chances to exercise their right to self-determination, but also options to choose from and sufficient contextual information based on which they can put their right to self-determination into action, as well as supporting them so that they can live in a self-actualizing way. Additionally, ways should be sought, through collaboration with civil society, to bring about changes in perspective toward conflicts of interest that arise involving the resident’s right to self-determination and the care worker’s roles.