Articles entitled ‘Some "rights" have limitations appear when a system of law espouses a doctrine of rights that has no, or at best an attenuated, concept of obligations as the correlative of rights. As Immanuel Kant explained during the Enlightenment and Onora O’Neill outlined more recently in her Reith Lectures on Trust (2002), obligations are always prior to rights.

This tells us why the judge in the case discussed by Sophie Khan was right to require the veiled juror to stand by. The duty to be able fully to participate in the trial trumped her right to wear the niqab.

Of course, a careful reading of the American jurist, WN Hohfeld, may be necessary to determine whether the wearing of the niqab is a right at all, or just a liberty.

Roger Turner, London N11