right to human dignity
Every human being has an unconditional and equal right to be treated with dignity and respect for his or her human quality and exceptional worth. This special legal status is determined by one’s innate human dignity and the legal protection of that dignity. The right to human dignity prohibits any treatment that disregards the values inherent in the personality of the individual.
The protection of human dignity was placed at the heart of the system of values of the democratic rule of law through international human rights efforts after the Second World War. It was mainly formulated in opposition to the inhumanity of dictatorships, and it led to the twentieth-century international human rights conventions and the European constitutions of countries undergoing regime change placing absolute respect for human dignity at the top of their catalogues of fundamental rights, emphasising their commitment.
States thus also express in their legal documents that human dignity is an absolute limit to human rights acts, the transgression of which can never be justified under any circumstances. The specific legal consequences of the abstract requirement of the protection of dignity are not uniform across different legal systems.
Hungarian law regards the right to human dignity as a formulation of general personality rights, a “parent right”, i.e. a subsidiary fundamental right, which the courts may invoke in all cases to protect the autonomy of the individual, if none of the specific, separately determined fundamental rights is applicable to the facts concerned (Constitutional Court decision 8/1990. (IV.23.) AB). The Hungarian Constitutional Court has identified the right of the individual to bodily integrity, self-determination, general freedom of action, the free development of personality and self-identity as important limits to the exercise of state power. (See also: freedom of identity, right to identity.)