Human Rights in Nursing: What the UDHR Changed

A patient asks you to close the curtain before personal care. Another refuses a procedure. A relative starts answering questions for someone who is able to answer for themselves. A patient with a hearing impairment is handed information in a form they cannot use.

These may look like ordinary moments in care, but each one involves a patient’s rights.

In nursing, human rights are often visible in ordinary things: whether someone is listened to, whether their privacy is protected, whether restrictions are justified, whether they are given the support needed to make their own decisions and whether they are treated differently because of who they are.

The legal framework behind those everyday decisions did not appear all at once. It developed through a chain of international declarations, treaties and domestic law, beginning with one of the most important documents of the twentieth century.

From the UDHR to UK healthcare

On 10 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). It was created in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust, when the consequences of persecution, genocide and the systematic denial of human dignity were impossible to ignore.

The Declaration set out 30 articles covering civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. These included the right to life and liberty, freedom from torture and degrading treatment, freedom of thought and religion, equality before the law, the right to education and the right to an adequate standard of living.

The UDHR was not a treaty and did not become an Act of Parliament in the UK. It is therefore not, by itself, a document that a patient would usually rely on directly in a UK court. Its importance is broader. It established a common international language of dignity, freedom and equality and influenced the treaties and laws that followed.

One of those was the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), adopted in 1950. Unlike the UDHR, the ECHR is a legally binding international treaty. The UK became bound by the Convention, and the Human Rights Act 1998 later brought most Convention rights into a form that can be relied on in UK courts.

Section 6 of the Human Rights Act makes it unlawful for a public authority to act incompatibly with a Convention right unless primary legislation leaves it no lawful alternative. That matters in publicly provided healthcare because human-rights duties are not simply ethical aspirations. They can form part of the legal framework within which care is delivered.

The rights themselves are not all the same. Some, such as the prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment, are absolute. Others are qualified, which means they may sometimes be restricted when there is a lawful basis and the interference is necessary and proportionate.

Article 25 of the UDHR also refers to medical care as part of an adequate standard of living for health and wellbeing. That does not mean the UDHR gives someone a directly enforceable right to any particular NHS treatment, and the Human Rights Act does not create a general right to demand whichever treatment a person chooses. Healthcare entitlements in the UK come from a much wider combination of legislation, devolved health-service arrangements, common law, equality law, professional duties and public-law decision-making.

What those rights look like in nursing

Human-rights law can sound remote until you connect each right to the kind of decisions nurses see every day.

Article 8: private and family life. This is one of the rights most often encountered in ordinary care. It can include privacy, bodily integrity, personal autonomy, confidentiality, identity, relationships and contact with family. Closing the door during intimate care, involving the patient in decisions, protecting confidential information and not discussing someone's health where they can be overheard all sit within the same broad territory.

Article 8 is a qualified right. Privacy or autonomy may sometimes be interfered with, for example where there is a lawful and proportionate need to protect the patient or someone else. The key point is that convenience is not enough. There must be a proper reason and a lawful basis for the interference.

Article 3: freedom from torture and inhuman or degrading treatment. In healthcare, this can become relevant where treatment, neglect, restraint or living conditions reach a sufficiently serious level. The legal threshold is high, so a poor experience or clinical error does not automatically become an Article 3 violation. Even so, the right makes clear that dignity is not an optional extra when people are dependent on others for care.

Article 2: the right to life. This does not guarantee that every treatment will work or create a right to unlimited intervention. It can, however, require public authorities to have appropriate systems in place to protect life and, in some circumstances, to take reasonable action when they know of a real and immediate risk to an individual.

Article 5: liberty and security. This becomes important when a person is detained or placed under such continuous control that they are not free to leave. Not every safety measure is a deprivation of liberty, but restrictions cannot simply be imposed because they make care easier to manage. The legal safeguards for capacity, detention and deprivation of liberty differ across the four UK nations, so the correct national law and local policy must be followed.

Article 9: thought, conscience and religion. Religious belief can affect diet, modesty, prayer, treatment choices, end-of-life care and who a patient wants involved. Services cannot always provide every requested arrangement, but beliefs should not be dismissed simply because they are unfamiliar or inconvenient.

Article 14: protection from discrimination. Article 14 is slightly different from a general equality law. It prohibits discrimination in the enjoyment of the other Convention rights rather than creating a completely standalone right to equality in every situation. That is one reason human-rights law and equality law often overlap without being identical.

Equality law sits alongside human-rights law

In England, Scotland and Wales, the Equality Act 2010 protects people from unlawful discrimination connected with nine protected characteristics: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation.

For disabled people, the Act also includes a duty to make reasonable adjustments in relevant circumstances. In healthcare, that can mean changing the way information is provided, allowing more time for communication, arranging appropriate access or adapting a process so that a disabled person is not placed at a substantial disadvantage.

This matters because treating everybody “the same” is not always equitable. If one patient cannot hear verbal information, another needs an interpreter and another cannot read standard written material, giving all three the same leaflet may look equal while still excluding two of them from meaningful participation.

The Equality Act 2010 applies in England, Scotland and Wales, but not in Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland has its own equality and anti-discrimination laws, alongside public-sector equality duties under Section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998. When writing or speaking about “UK equality law”, that distinction matters.

Follow one patient through the principles

Imagine a patient admitted after a stroke. They have dysarthria, wear hearing aids and need extra time to process information. During a discussion about treatment, staff begin directing questions to the patient's daughter because communication is taking longer than usual.

The patient has not yet been shown to lack capacity. Their speech difficulty and hearing impairment do not, by themselves, remove their right to be involved.

The first nursing question is practical: what support would allow this person to participate? Are their hearing aids working? Is the environment quiet enough? Would written prompts help? Do they need more time to respond? Is specialist communication support required?

That is where equality law, autonomy and capacity begin to meet. Reasonable communication support may be necessary before anyone can fairly judge whether the patient can understand, retain, use or weigh the relevant information and communicate a decision. The legal test and process for capacity vary across the UK, but the principle of supporting decision-making before replacing it is central.

If you want to go further into that distinction, Bleepbook's Capacity and Consent: What Is the Difference? article looks at it in more detail.

Now imagine that the same patient needs personal care. Their privacy still matters. A communication difficulty does not make it acceptable to discuss their health loudly in a shared bay, expose them unnecessarily or involve relatives in conversations they have not agreed to share.

Later, suppose the team becomes worried that the patient may leave the ward unsafely. The answer is not simply “they are confused, so stop them”. The degree of restriction, the person's decision-making ability, the immediate risk and the relevant legal framework all matter. Human rights do not provide a one-line answer to the clinical problem. They change the way the problem must be approached.

That is what makes these rights clinically useful. They force us to ask whether the patient has been heard, whether support has been tried, whether an interference is genuinely necessary and whether the restriction being considered is proportionate to the risk.

Where the NMC Code fits

The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) Code is not a human-rights treaty and does not replace the law. It is the professional standard that registered nurses, midwives and nursing associates must uphold in the UK.

Its four themes are to prioritise people, practise effectively, preserve safety and promote professionalism and trust. Within those themes sit duties that closely echo human-rights principles: treating people with kindness and respect, preserving dignity, listening to preferences, obtaining consent, maintaining privacy and confidentiality, avoiding discriminatory behaviour and raising concerns when care is unsafe.

For a student nurse, this does not mean trying to make legal decisions independently. It means noticing when something does not sit comfortably and knowing when to ask questions or escalate.

If a patient is being spoken about rather than spoken to, if communication needs are being ignored, if privacy is being lost because the ward is busy, if restrictions are becoming routine or if someone is being treated differently because of a protected characteristic, those are not small observations.

They are part of safe, lawful and professionally accountable care.

The UDHR changed the language of rights at a global level. In nursing, that legacy is visible much closer to the bedside: in whether one person is listened to, protected, included and treated with dignity when they are at their most dependent on others.

References

Equality Act 2010. Available at: UK Legislation.

Equality Commission for Northern Ireland. Equality laws in Northern Ireland. Available at: Equality Commission for Northern Ireland.

Equality and Human Rights Commission. Equality and human rights in social care. Available at: EHRC.

European Convention on Human Rights. Available at: European Court of Human Rights.

Human Rights Act 1998. Available at: UK Legislation.

Nursing and Midwifery Council. The Code: Professional standards of practice and behaviour for nurses, midwives and nursing associates. Available at: NMC.

United Nations. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Available at: United Nations.