Human Rights - A right to defend our right to life

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Ayn Rand writes in The Virtue of Selfishness that there is only one basic human right, viz. the right to life; other rights, insofar as they are real, are consequences or corollaries of the right to life. The German bill of rights (the first chapter of the Basic Statute) starts with human dignity, which is inalienable. Presumably the enumerated rights in the rest of the bill are to be understood as consequences or corollaries of human dignity. The traditional Anglo formulation (Locke, etc.) is to take the rights to life, to liberty and to property as basic, others being corollaries. Those writing the U.S. Declaration of Independence had some difficulty about property as basic, and substituted the pursuit of happiness. We can conveniently combine these not at all disparate formulations: from human dignity arises the right to life; from that arise the rights to liberty and to property; from the three (life, liberty and property) we can derive the other rights. Human dignity and rights come from God, but the ethicists do most of their arguing without much reference to God, so we can say they come from the reality of a rational animal. The other rights fall conveniently into two groups: civil and political on the one hand; social, economic and cultural on the other. The latter group is more aspirational, whereas the former is fully judicable. States, corporations, nations, etc. have no rights in themselves, but it has been found convenient to formulate communal rights as a way of securing the rights of natural persons - a corporation can sue and be sued as a fictive person so that its stakeholders can be paid or pay for the deeds they have done through the corporation. States are established to secure human rights. They often fail, and even themselves violate human rights (e.g. the UK NHS performs abortions, the Soviet Gulag imprisoned many innocent people, etc.). If we have a right to live then we also have a right to protect our right to live. Otherwise the right itself is of no value.