Inalienable Rights?

I've recently been reading Alisdair McIntyre's amazing book, After Virtue. It's an interesting reflection on contemporary philosophy's inability to conceptualize a stable foundation for ethics. McIntyre is working within an Aristotelian framework, which I particularly appreciate (I think very highly of Aristotle's Ethics). But one particular point in the early chapters of the book has stood out to me. 

McIntyre argues that the idea of human rights is entirely artificial.
We have no philosophical basis to believe that such rights are anything more than convenient fictions used to protect citizens from government encroachment. He writes:

They are the rights which were spoken of in the eighteenth century as natural rights or as the rights of man... sometimes in that century and much more often in our own positive rights—rights to due process, to education or to employment are examples—are added to the list... But whether negative or positive and however named they are supposed to attach equally to all individuals, whatever their se, race, religion, talents or deserts, and to provide a ground for a variety of particular moral stances…The best reason for asserting so bluntly that there are no such rights is indeed of precisely the same type as the best reason which we possess for asserting that there are no witches and the best reason which we possess for asserting that there are no unicorns: every attempt to give good reasons for believing that there are such rights has failed... Natural and human rights then are fictions—just as utility—but fictions with highly specific properties” (66-7).McIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth, 1981. Print.

His words struck me particularly strongly, because I realized for the first time that I had always assumed, without foundation, that human rights, in the Declaration of Independence sense, simply existed.

But when I try to think of a Biblical foundation for such rights, I draw something of a blank. Clearly, humans have intrinsic value as imago dei. But nowhere does Scripture say that, because of this fact, we ought to protect one another's rights. Rather, Christ commands us to love one another. In other words, our ethical systems are based on duties to others, not on asserting our own rights or deserts. 

Of course, these commands to people don't translate very well into institutions. So perhaps, to protect citizens, government ought to be founded on a political philosophy of human rights. But this still causes problems, because, as McIntyre notes, the concept of human rights has a tendency to grow in varied and controversial directions. What is the solution? Should we return to a strictly negative conception of rights? Or try to find some middle ground?

Do human rights actually have some theological or philosophical basis? Or are they just useful fabrications? And if so, ought they to be retained? And in what form? McIntyre's thoughts have opened up fascinating new vistas for discussion. I would love to hear how you respond.