Joseph Massad wrote an interesting column on The 'Arab Spring' and other American seasons.
Besides its relevance for the current U.S. revolutionary enterprise in the Middle East it includes an interesting historic view of distinguishing human rights from civil rights:
The Soviet/US struggle over defining human rights is now the stuff of Cold War history given the US victory in the Cold War, but a brief review is necessary. While the US insisted that having the right to work, to free or universally affordable healthcare, free education, daycare and housing (which the Soviet system granted in the USSR and across Eastern Europe as substantive and not merely as formal rights) are not human rights at all, the Soviets, in the tradition of socialism, insisted they were essential for human life and dignity and that the western enumerating of the rights to free speech, free association, free movement, freedom to form political parties, etc., were "political" and "civil" and not "human" rights, and that in reality in the West, they were at any rate only formal and not substantive rights except for the upper echelons of society and those who owned the media and could access it and who could fund election campaigns, etc.
Moreover the Soviets argued that it was essential for humans to have human rights in order to be able to access civil and political rights in a substantive manner and that granting formal civil and political rights while denying substantive human rights amounted to granting no rights at all.
What the Soviets, according to Massad, viewed as basic human rights was at a time also propagandized in the United States. In his 1941 message to congress U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke of the four freedoms:
The four freedoms he outlined were freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
Roosevelt's last two "freedoms" can be seen as those the Soviets considered as real "human rights" while Roosevelt's first two "freedoms" are political and thereby "civil rights".
Personally I agree with the Soviet nomenclature.
What is the meaning of the right to vote or to free speech when one is dying of hunger or for lack of medicine? The best is of course to have it all but if, in dire times, you would have to choose which two "freedoms" would you then prefer?
As Massad writes the U.S. is propagandizing its lacking version of "human rights", which only means some civil rights, to prevent people from demanding their real human rights, social justice and economic rights.
The rather genuine revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt were largely carried by people in want of their basic economic human rights, their daily bread. The U.S. democracy propaganda is just a means to paper over those demands and to arrange for regimes that will continue to deny them. In Libya and Syrian, where the basic economic rights were widely, though uneven fulfilled, external instigation and military support was needed to bring those countries in line with U.S. demands: Give them civil rights, Roosevelt's first two "freedoms", but not those other rights that are counter to the neo-liberal ideology and infringe on our profits.