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

Contemporary human-rights discourse is dominated by a short canon of civil, political, economic and social entitlements drawn from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [25] and the two International Covenants [26], [27]. Yet many conditions that people themselves identify as essential to a decent life, such as peaceful sleep, happiness, respect, money, a job and the freedom to marry, are either left implicit in that canon or are discussed only in fragments. This article develops the 108-Rights Matrix, an original taxonomy that arranges 108 distinct, duty-correlative rights into nine domains of twelve rights each: Life, Body and Health; Mind, Emotion and Wellbeing; Dignity, Identity and Recognition; Liberty, Thought and Expression; Justice, Law and Governance; Economic Livelihood and Material Security; Family, Relationships and Community; Knowledge, Culture and Learning; and Environment, Technology and Future. Using a conceptual-analytical method, we derive the catalogue from international instruments, constitutional jurisprudence, capability theory and the lived-experience literature, and screen every candidate against five tests: universality, necessity for flourishing, distinctness, duty-correlativity and enforceability gradient. Each right is given a normative description and a status code: Codified (54 rights), Emerging (39) or Proposed (15). Six “Founding Rights” (happiness, peaceful sleep, money, respect, work and marriage) are analysed in depth as an illustration of how everyday goods can be translated into rights without collapsing into utopian guarantees. We argue that the Matrix serves as (i) a pedagogical map, (ii) an audit instrument for policy and constitutional design, and (iii) a transparent way of separating settled law from moral aspiration. Limitations and avenues for empirical validation are discussed.