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I have been doing a little background reading on rights. Here are some definitions or near definitions of rights from various authors.

The 19th-century philosopher J. S. Mill, the most famous utilitarian of his time, wrote this:

When we call anything a person's right, we mean that he has a valid claim on society to protect  him in the possession of it, either by the force of law, or by that of education and opinion. If he has what we consider a sufficient claim, on whatever account, to have something guaranteed to him by society, we say that he has a right to it.....To have a right, then, is, I conceive, to have something which society ought to defend me in the possession of. If the objector goes on to ask why it ought, I can give him no other reason than general utility. [John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, chapter V]

A 20th-century utilitarian, Richard Brandt, offered this definition of a right:

What  normative affirmation, not making use of the term "a right," corresponds to the claim we, now, are normally making when we say "X has a moral right against Z to do, have, or enjoy Y," at least when this expression is taken in its most important sense:? I suggest the following: "Some Z -- either individual or individuals or sovereign body -- has a strong moral obligation not overridable by marginal or even substantial but only by extreme demands of welfare, both to refrain from interfering with X's having or doing or enjoying Y, and to enable X to do, have, or enjoy Y; and it is not wrong for X to feel resentment if he is hurt or deprived because of the failure of Z to discharge that obligation...." [Richard Brandt, Morality, Utilitarianism, and Rights, p. 197]

Father John Ryan, and early 20th-century Catholic moral theologian tells us:

A right in the moral sense may be defined as an inviolable moral claim to some personal good. When this claim is created, as it sometimes is, by civil authority it is a positive or legal right; when it is derived from man's "rational nature" it is a natural right. All rights are means, moral means, whereby the possessor of them is enabled to reach some end. Natural rights are the moral means or opportunities by which the individual attains the end appointed to him by nature. [John Ryan, Economic Justice: Selections from Distributive Justice and A Living Wage, p. 161.]

Richard Wasserstrom writes:

To have a right to something is, typically, to be entitled to receive or possess or enjoy it now, and to do so without securing the consent of another. As long as one has a right to anything, it is beyond the reach or another properly to withhold or deny it. In addition, to have a right is to be absolved from the obligation to weigh a variety of what would in other contexts be relevant considerations; it is to be entitled to the object of the right -- at least prima facie -- without more ado. To have a right to anything is, in short, to have a very strong moral or legal claim upon it. It is the strongest kind of claim that there is. [Richard Wasserstrom, "Rights, Human rights, and Racial Discrimination," Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 61, No. 20, p. 630]

Joel Feinberg writes:

The distinction between positive and negative claim-rights is (perhaps deceptively) simple. A positive right is a right to other persons' positive actions; a negative right is a right to other persons' omissions or forebearances. For every positive right i have, someone else has a duty to do something; for every negative right I have, someone else has a duty to refrain from doing something. [Joel Feinberg, Social Philosophy, p. 59]

Alan Gewirth, a philosopher who argued that we are guilty of a contradiction if we deny certain individual human rights, offers this introductory remark:

It will be helpful for understanding this and related aspects of human rights if we note that the full structure of a claim-right is given by the following formula:

A has a right to X against B by virtue of Y.
There are five main elements here: first, the Subject (A) of the right, the person who has it; second, the Nature of the right; third, the Object (X) of the right, what it is a right to; fourth, the Respondent (B) of the right, the person or persons who have the correlative duty; and fifth, the Justifying Basis or Ground (Y) of the right. [Alan Gewirth, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications, p. 2]

A right entitles a person to enjoy some good if he so wishes, and it requires others not to interfere with the right-holder's enjoyment of that good or to supply it for him on demand. [Diana Meyers, Inalienable Rights: A Defense, p. 24.