They are "rights which are believed to belong to every person", made to supposedly protect people from potential unfairness or cruelty if you want to go far, just like laws are made so that society functions.
Of course the universe does not care about this, just like it doesn't care about morality, but someone has if you want to not have chaos.
So for example, a human right would be to be free from torture (under the specific criteria for what that is), so it should not be legal for someone to torture you. Or it could be to be treated equally under the law (under the same conditions of course, with traits such as gender or race not being discriminatory) which are kind of violated every day, so some of them are not retarded.
The retarded thing is that some rights are constantly violated; nobody owes you anything, the world does not owe you anything, "should" and "deserve" mean nothing, yet it would be wise to have some sort of made up justice that attempts to bring actual fairness (although usually failing throughout the course of humanity).