The 108-Rights Matrix: An Integrative Nine-Domain Taxonomy of Human Rights from Sleep and Happiness to Money, Marriage and Digital Selfhood

Introduction

Human rights are often introduced as a list. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) contains thirty articles [25]; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) elaborate these into a body of binding obligations [26], [27]. Over the ensuing decades, rights discourse has widened to include children, women, persons with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, the environment and the digital sphere. The result is a rich but fragmented landscape in which a person asking “what am I entitled to?” may find the answer scattered across treaties, constitutions, court judgments and soft-law resolutions.

Fragmentation matters because ordinary people tend to describe their needs in the language of everyday life rather than the language of treaty articles. They speak of wanting to be happy, to sleep without being disturbed, to earn enough money, to be treated with respect, to have a job and to marry the person they choose. These are not frivolous aspirations. Each corresponds to a recognisable cluster of existing legal protections, and each exposes a gap in how rights are presented. Sleep, for instance, is nowhere named in the UDHR, yet it is a biological precondition of health and cognition [7] and has been read into the constitutional right to life by the Supreme Court of India [12]. Happiness is not a treaty right, but the United Nations General Assembly has formally invited states to give it a place in public policy [33].

This article asks a simple question: can the field of human rights be mapped completely, systematically and memorably, in a way that includes both the settled canon and the everyday goods that people actually value? Our answer is the 108-Rights Matrix, a nine-by-twelve grid of rights. The number 108 is a design choice, not a numerological claim. A fixed and symmetrical structure forces disciplined thinking: each domain must justify exactly twelve entries, so that the catalogue can be neither padded nor allowed to omit an entire area of life. The number also carries cultural resonance in South Asian and East Asian traditions, where 108 is regarded as a complete and auspicious count, and this aids recall in teaching. The Matrix is intended to be revised: other scholars may reasonably argue that a right should be added, merged or removed.

The contribution of the article is threefold. First, it offers a comprehensive catalogue that integrates codified, emerging and proposed rights within a single classification. Second, it introduces an explicit status gradient (Codified–Emerging–Proposed) so that moral aspiration is never mistaken for settled law. Third, it analyses six Founding Rights in depth to show how everyday goods can be converted into rights through the discipline of duty-correlativity.

Conceptual and Theoretical Background

Rights as claims with correlative duties

Our working definition of a right draws on Hohfeld’s [8] analysis, in which a claim-right is a relation between a right-holder and a duty-bearer. A right without an identifiable duty-bearer is rhetoric; a right with one is an instrument. Raz [21] sharpens the point: an individual has a right if an aspect of their well-being is a sufficient reason for holding another to be under a duty. This interest-based conception is well suited to rights such as sleep or respect, whose justification is the importance of the underlying interest rather than an explicit text.

Generations, basic rights and the problem of proliferation

Vasak [35] famously grouped rights into three “generations”: civil and political liberties, economic and social entitlements, and solidarity rights such as development and a healthy environment. Marshall [17] had earlier traced a similar progression within citizenship. Shue [24] argued that security and subsistence are basic rights, because the enjoyment of every other right depends on them. Critics warn of “rights inflation”, the concern that an ever-expanding list dilutes the moral force of core rights [6], [3]. We take the criticism seriously, and therefore build into the Matrix a status gradient and screening tests that distinguish core claims from aspirational ones.

Capabilities, dignity and recognition

Sen [22] and Nussbaum [19] approach well-being through capabilities, namely what people are actually able to do and to be. Nussbaum’s list of central capabilities (life, bodily health, bodily integrity, senses and thought, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, play, control over one’s environment) overlaps strongly with several domains of the Matrix and informs our domains of Life, Mind and Dignity. Honneth’s [9] theory of recognition adds that self-respect and esteem depend on patterns of intersubjective recognition, which supports the inclusion of respect, esteem and freedom from humiliation as rights in their own right. Donnelly [4] reminds us that rights are historically specific social practices, not eternal truths, which justifies treating the catalogue as a living, revisable instrument.

The structure of rights and their limits

Dworkin [5] described rights as “trumps” against collective goals, while Alexy [1] models rights as optimisation requirements that must be balanced against competing principles. The Matrix adopts the second view for most entries: a right such as peaceful sleep is real but not absolute; it will sometimes be balanced against, for example, religious processions or emergency works. What is non-negotiable is that the balancing be explicit, proportionate and reasoned.

Methodology

The study adopts a conceptual-analytical and doctrinal design. It is not an empirical survey, and no human participants were involved. The procedure comprised four stages.

Stage 1: Source mapping. We compiled candidate rights from (a) the UDHR, ICCPR, ICESCR and the thematic treaties on children, women and persons with disabilities [25]–[30]; (b) constitutional jurisprudence, with particular attention to the Indian Constitution’s Article 21 case law, which has expansively read the right to life to include livelihood, shelter, privacy, speedy trial and freedom of marriage [16], [20], [13], [23]; (c) General Assembly resolutions and regional instruments; and (d) the capability and recognition literatures reviewed in Section 2.

Stage 2: Domain construction. Candidates were clustered by the area of human life they protect rather than by the legal instrument in which they appear. This yielded nine domains, which can be read as concentric layers: body (A), mind (B), self-in-society (C), freedom (D), institutions (E), material life (F), relationships (G), knowledge (H) and the wider world (I).

Stage 3: The five-test screen. Each candidate had to satisfy five tests: (1) Universality: could it plausibly be claimed by any person in any society? (2) Necessity for flourishing: does its absence seriously impair a decent life? (3) Distinctness: does it protect an interest not already fully captured by another entry? (4) Duty-correlativity: can a duty-bearer (State, employer, family, corporation) be named, and the duty specified? (5) Enforceability gradient: can progress towards realisation be assessed, even if full judicial enforcement is not presently possible?

Stage 4: Status coding. Each right was coded C (Codified) if it is expressly recognised in major universal instruments or is firmly established in widely followed jurisprudence; E (Emerging) if it is recognised in some jurisdictions, in soft law or in the interpretation of other rights; and P (Proposed) if it is primarily a normative claim advanced here or in the scholarly literature. Coding is a judgment and is open to contestation; the Appendix-style catalogue in Section 4 makes each coding visible so that readers can disagree with it.

The 108-Rights Matrix

Architecture

Table 1 summarises the nine domains. Each domain contains exactly twelve rights, numbered consecutively from 1 to 108. Rights bearing a star (★) are the six Founding Rights supplied as the seed set for this study.

Table 1. Domains of the 108-Rights Matrix, with rights numbering and status distribution (C / E / P).

Status codes: C = Codified; E = Emerging; P = Proposed (see Section 3, Stage 4).

Catalogue of the 108 rights

The catalogue follows. For each right, the description states the core entitlement and, where useful, the principal duty-bearer or legal anchor. Treaty abbreviations: UDHR [25]; ICCPR [26]; ICESCR [27]; CEDAW [28]; CRC [29]; CRPD [30]. Shaded rows with a star are the six Founding Rights.

Domain A: Life, Body and Health

Domain B: Mind, Emotion and Well-being

Domain C: Dignity, Identity and Recognition

Domain D: Liberty, Thought and Expression

Domain E: Justice, Law and Governance

Domain F: Economic Livelihood and Material Security

Domain G: Family, Relationships and Community

Domain H: Knowledge, Culture and Learning

Domain I: Environment, Technology and Future

Analysis of the Six Founding Rights

The six rights that seeded this study (happiness, peaceful sleep, money, respect, work and marriage) illustrate how the Matrix converts familiar goods into carefully bounded rights. Table 2 sets out, for each, the entitlement, the principal duty-bearers and the status assigned.

Table 2. Duty-correlative analysis of the Six Founding Rights.

Happiness: a right to conditions, not to an outcome

A legal guarantee that every person be happy would be incoherent: emotions cannot be commanded by law. The more defensible reading is that persons have a claim to the social and material preconditions of happiness, such as security, relationships, meaningful work, rest and freedom. The Matrix therefore locates the right to happiness in the domain of Mind and Well-being, surrounds it with related entitlements (emotional safety, play, purpose, help-seeking without stigma), and frames the duty as one of policy orientation and measurement rather than of results. This reading is consistent with the General Assembly’s call for well-being to be given appropriate weight in development policy [33].

Peaceful sleep: from biology to entitlement

Expert panels recommend that most adults sleep seven or more hours per night, with higher requirements for children and adolescents [7]. Chronic sleep loss is thus a public-health matter, not a private inconvenience. Rights language adds something that a health recommendation cannot: it identifies those who are obliged to protect sleep. Obvious instances include authorities regulating night-time noise, institutions that conduct prolonged interrogations or impose punitive shift patterns, and neighbours or event organisers who impose avoidable disturbance. Because sleep claims regularly conflict with other interests (festivals, construction, emergency services), the right is classified as Emerging and subject to proportionality review.

Money: sufficiency, access and inclusion

The right to money is the most novel of the six. It is not a right to wealth. It is a right to adequate monetary means and access to the financial system. Three components can be distinguished: an income floor secured through fair wages or social transfers; the legal and practical ability to hold, save, send and receive money; and protection from arbitrary exclusion from banking and payment services. Empirical research suggests that higher income improves life evaluation, although its relationship to everyday emotional well-being is debated [14]; the right therefore targets sufficiency rather than accumulation. It is coded Proposed because no major instrument names it as such, although its elements derive from the rights to social security, an adequate standard of living and fair wages.

Respect: dignity in the everyday

Dignity is the grounding value of the UDHR, but its abstractness can leave daily indignities (rudeness from officials, contempt towards the poor, condescension towards disabled persons) outside the reach of rights claims. Drawing on recognition theory [9], the Matrix makes respect an independent right, with duty-bearers extending beyond the State to employers, service providers and, in a limited sense, private individuals. Remedies are typically institutional (codes of conduct, complaint mechanisms, training) rather than punitive.

Job and marriage: established rights, richer content

The rights to work and to marry are already recognised in the international canon (UDHR arts. 16 and 23). The Matrix adds precision. Work is analysed as a bundle: the entitlement to obtain work, to work on just terms, to be paid fairly, to organise, and to be free from bondage, each separately listed in Domain F. Marriage is analysed as a consent-centred right, accompanied by the right to free and full consent, to found a family, to dissolve a marriage and to intimate association, listed in Domain G. Indian jurisprudence illustrates the point: the Supreme Court has affirmed that an adult’s choice of life partner is integral to liberty and dignity [23] and has decriminalised consensual same-sex relations [18].

Results of the Classification

Of the 108 rights, 54 (50.0%) are coded Codified, 39 (36.1%) Emerging and 15 (13.9%) Proposed. Table 1 shows how these are distributed. Three patterns stand out. First, the domains of Liberty (D), Justice (E) and Economic Livelihood (F) are dominated by Codified rights, reflecting the weight of the civil-political and economic-social covenants. Second, Mind and Well-being (B) and Environment, Technology and Future (I) contain the largest share of Emerging and Proposed rights, which suggests that these areas are where rights discourse is currently growing. Third, the Founding Rights are spread across five of the nine domains, confirming that the everyday goods people value do not fall neatly within any single branch of law.

The practical value of the status gradient is clarity. A civil-society organisation drafting a charter can rely on the Codified rights as legal claims; a legislature may prioritise the Emerging rights for statutory development; and researchers may test the Proposed rights empirically (for instance, whether a legally protected right to disconnect measurably reduces work-related stress).

Discussion

Three uses of the Matrix

As a pedagogical map, the Matrix enables teachers to present human rights as a coherent whole: body, mind, self, freedom, institutions, livelihood, relationships, knowledge and the wider world. As an audit instrument, a government, university or company can score itself against the 108 entries to identify neglected domains. As a drafting aid, constitution-makers and legislators can use it as a checklist to ask which rights are protected, by whom and at what level.

Conflicts between rights

A catalogue of 108 rights will generate collisions. Table 3 identifies five typical conflicts and the balancing principle suggested by the Matrix. In each case, the guiding method is proportionality [1]: the limitation must pursue a legitimate aim, be suitable and necessary, and be proportionate in the strict sense.

Table 3. Illustrative rights conflicts and suggested balancing approaches.

Responding to the inflation objection

The strongest objection to a list of 108 rights is that quantity may undermine quality: if everything is a right, nothing is. We offer three replies. First, the Matrix does not claim that all 108 entries have equal legal force. The status gradient is designed precisely to prevent that inference. Second, many entries are specifications of broader rights (for instance, the right to disconnect specifies aspects of just working conditions, rest and privacy), whose value lies in making abstract protections operational. Third, the discipline of duty-correlativity bars empty rhetoric: for each right the Matrix asks who owes what to whom. Where no plausible duty-bearer can be named, the candidate was removed.

Cultural universality and pluralism

Any attempt at a universal taxonomy must confront the charge of cultural parochialism. We have tried to mitigate this by using sources from several legal traditions and by including rights that matter in non-Western contexts, such as dignified last rites, community belonging and language. Nonetheless the catalogue is shaped by its author’s positionality and by the dominance of English-language sources. We encourage comparative replication by scholars working in African, Latin American, Islamic, East Asian and Indigenous legal traditions.

Limitations and Future Research

Several limitations should be acknowledged. First, the work is conceptual; the five-test screen and the status coding rely on scholarly judgment and have not been validated by an expert panel. A Delphi study with international lawyers, philosophers and rights practitioners would be a natural next step. Second, the status coding is time-bound: rights move from Proposed to Emerging to Codified as law develops, and jurisdictions differ. The coding should be read as a general, not jurisdiction-specific, assessment and must be verified against current law before being relied on in litigation or policy. Third, the number of rights was fixed at 108 for structural reasons; alternative groupings are possible. Fourth, the Matrix does not attempt to rank rights or to resolve all conflicts among them. Future work could (i) survey public perceptions of the relative importance of the 108 rights across countries, (ii) construct a composite index of national performance against the Matrix, (iii) examine how courts reason about the Proposed rights, and (iv) test causal claims, for instance on the effects of sleep protection, income floors or disconnection laws on well-being.

Conclusion

This article has presented the 108-Rights Matrix, a nine-domain taxonomy that integrates the canonical human rights with the everyday goods of happiness, sleep, money, respect, work and marriage, along with emerging claims in the environmental and digital spheres. By requiring every entry to meet five tests and to carry an explicit status code, the Matrix tries to be both ambitious and honest: ambitious in its recognition that a life of dignity depends on far more than the classical freedoms, and honest in distinguishing what the law already guarantees from what society has yet to secure. We offer it not as a final list but as a scaffold for debate, teaching and reform. If it prompts readers to ask, of each right, who owes what to whom, it will have served its purpose.

Acknowledgements

My heartfelt gratitude goes to everyone and everything that has, in ways both seen and unseen, directly or indirectly contributed to the person I am today. Every person, experience, opportunity, challenge, and circumstance has played a part in shaping my journey.

Funding

This research received no external funding.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Data Availability Statement

This study did not generate, collect, or analyze any datasets; therefore, data availability is not applicable.

AI Usage Disclosure

This article is generated by Artificial Intelligence under the guidance of Satish Gajawada.

Author Contributions

This article is generated by Artificial Intelligence under the guidance of Satish Gajawada.

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