English, French and Spanish, almost certainly among others, have the same word for “right” as in the right side of your body, and “right” as in a legal or moral right (you have the right to remain silent).
Two questions:
Summary from www.etymonline.com :
PIE *reg- (“move in a straight line; to put right”) > Proto-Germanic *rehtan > Old English *riht *“just, good, fair; proper, fitting; straight, not bent, direct, erect” > English right (“morally correct; opposite of left; etc.”).
(The right hand is the “proper” hand since a majority favors that hand.)
Right and Left as political terms are borrowed (with translation) from French: in the French National Assembly in 1789 the nobility took the seats on the President’s right and left the Third Estate to sit on the left.
In French, droit has the same multiple meanings. This French word derives from Latin directus; that word also derives from the the PIE root **reg-*.
The relationship certainly exists in Finnish, which is a non-Indo-European language. oikea means “right” as in “right hand”; as well as “right” as in “right answer” (correct, fair or true); oikeus is a “right” as in an entitlement.
The Irish word for right comes from a different origin (the same as the Latin word dexter), but it has a similar range of meaning (as well as meaning “south” and “nice” or “agreeable” in modern Irish).
Works in Polish (which is Indo-European, but not Romance) with pravo.
In Hungarian (a non-Indo-European language related to Finnish) they do look similar, though I don’t know what their etymology is. “Right” is jobb; “rights” is jogok (singular it would be jog.) “Good” is jó, and “better” is jobb, just like the directional definition of “right.” It seems like they are interrelated, but I’ve never researched the roots. Somebody like Johanna, though, I’m sure would know, as she knows quite a bit about languages in general, and also Finno-Ugric ones (or whatever the current classification is) in particular.
Re the specific examples of Finnish and Hungarian, there is a fair amount of evidence of lexicon borrowing relatively far back (<< 1000 CE anyway) from IE languages into Uralic (or Finno-Ugric if you prefer - it’s been a long time but I think the difference between the two is more or less the position of Samoyedic). ISTR some people who studied it thinking that there might have been an IE/Uralic sprachbund. I suppose there could be a semantic equivalent to a sprachbund.
Is there a comparative linguist in the house? Does the semantic carry over into in the Indo-Iranian branches too?
Basque as well. From Elhuyar, I went ES->EU because I wanted to see what happens with other meanings of the Spanish word derecho.
“right side”: eskuineko, eskuin
“human rights and so forth”: eskubide
“straight” (direction, position, “straight and narrow kind of person”): zuzen
“legal system”: zuzenbide
“law school”: Zuzenbide Fakultatea
“the good side” (the side of a piece of cloth that should show, in their own example): aurki
I expect that the etymological connection has to do with the association of sinister and evil/nasty, dexterous and good/useful/skilled. Dexter, right, is good; sinister, left, is bad. Something which is good, rightfully done, is done on the “dextra” side. But this is just a WAG from a non-linguist.