Dignity is a slippery term. Writing extra-curially, Lady Hale once asked 'what does dignity mean? It is not a lawyers' concept.' According to Kant, humans possess an inherent dignity, that requires us to treat other human beings as people and not 'things'; dignity makes us an end in ourselves, and not a means to other ends. As a concept linked to 'rights' dignity began to emerge after the Second World War in what Francesca Klug has called the second-wave rights. Dignity is enshrined in the preamble of that most aspirational and poetic of post-war human rights instruments, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
'Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world'
It is a concept sufficiently noble, grand and vague that all the signatories to the UDHR could agree upon it as a grounding for the more detailed human rights it established. Whereas the 'first wave' rights of the Enlightenment and Modern era tended to enshrine political and civil rights grounded in autonomy and liberty ('the right to be left alone'), dignity could potentially ground welfarist social and economic rights. The kind of rights where a state actually had to take steps to do things for their citizens, rather than refrain from interfering with them. Klug writes:
