It is easy to see the outlines of the argument when one considers rights as God-given. God does not contradict himself. If rights natually came into conflict, God would, apparently have contradicted himself because the rights in conflict could not both be respected, i.e., we would be unable to treat our neighbor as he or she ought to be treated.
If rights are given by a community, they must be treated as inflexible (seen as something that cannot be justly trampled on or otherwise broken or ignored). If the majority's acceptance or promotion of an infringement justifies the transgression if a right, then human rights reduce to near, if not complete, meaninglessness.
Without settling on which human rights exist, there is little to say about how human rights will affect specific policy decisions. We have to be able to state what these rights are if we are to pay careful attention to protecting these rights. This stating of rights (including the times at which it does not apply as one might intuitively think) is required to make the best policies and to protect human rights. For example, if a human right were well-stated as 'any person who is a government official has the right to drive anyone's car whenever that official pleases', then a good law would be that it is illegal for a non-government-official to refuse to lend a government official his or her car. This would protect government officials' right stated above.
I wrote this because I am afraid that we are seeing increasing amounts of policies that are made in the name of human rights, but these rights and the other rights (like right to property) are not being stated at all, much less as a complete framework of interrelated and coherent rights. Without this, we are in danger of promoting some supposed rights by infringing on other supposed rights without realizing what we are doing. An increase in the number of related and explicit statements of rights we use in policy discussions will increase the clarity with which we view policy decisions.
