Abstract

From the judgements of the higher Courts on human dignity of Switzerland and Ger- many we obtain the following main meanings of the concept: dignity as a guarantee of a status, as a prohibition to discriminate people or to instrumentalize or humiliate them. The guarantee of a person's status and the prohibition to discriminate them cover only a little part of the decided cases while the prohibition to instrumentalize people is either too narrow or too wide to comprehend the proper scope of the human dignity's guarantee. Therefore current discussion prefers to use the concept of prohibition to discriminate peoples to depict the end of that guarantee. At any rate the usual understanding of hu- miliation as an offence to one's self-respect shows further difficult problems. The Author aims both to explain the offence to human dignity as a refusal of recognition and on this ground to develop some different kinds of that refusal.