The contradictory relationship between security and human rights

Security and human rights have a contradictory relationship. The crux of the problem lies in the tension that exists between the different approaches to security and the protection of human rights in different contexts and periods, in which fear plays a fundamental role. This review article describes how the public security, citizen security and human security perspectives can be manipulated so that they do not fulfil the objective of guaranteeing human rights and citizen freedoms and actually end up promoting the violation or limitation of these. In other words, these approaches exhibit the oppositional logic that states that what is gained in security is lost in rights, a perspective which ignores the dynamics that should accompany democratic regimes, where security is not an end in itself, but rather a means by which the state and its institutions can guarantee the effective enjoyment of human rights and civil liberties.