My belief is that natural rights are defined by God and therefore exist regardless of whether people agree with them or not. Sort of the rights equivalent of divine command theory.
To me that's kind of like the sound a falling tree makes when no-one is there to hear it. As I see it, rights exist in the context of a social framework that defines the limits of acceptable behaviour. They can be seen as actually curtailing freedoms, since if we're defining rights, we're also implying there are things an entity does not have a right to. In any case, a right is not very meaningful to me if there is no system in place to ensure it is respected.
This is, of course, not an argument about moral rigts and wrongs, just a pragmatic one about how rights work.
