Introduction to Development of Human Rights

Human rights are the basic freedoms, liberties, and protections to which all persons are entitled. Human rights are not specific to one government or religion. They do not differ in times of war or peace. Human rights are constant and inalienable rights, possessed by all people. Ideally, governments should promote and protect human rights through systems of law.

Today, human rights include life, liberty, and security of person; the freedom of religion, thought, political expression, movement, assembly, speech, and organization; due process of law, education, employment, health, property ownership, cultural preservation; the right to marry and found a family; and freedom from discrimination, unjust punishment, persecution, tyranny, and oppression.

The modern concept of human rights developed over three centuries. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the concept of natural rights emerged. Natural rights are not subject to any political, legal, or religious system. They are inalienable rights that humans possess from birth. The Declaration of Independence (1776) perhaps best summarized natural rights: "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

The concept of natural rights gained popularity during the American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century. Both nations struggled to forge new representative governments that would best promote the natural rights of citizens. Both nations produced contemporaneous statements of rights—France, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens, and the United States the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (both included in this chapter).

These documents provide the foundation for the modern concept of human rights. However, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens and the Bill of Rights did not extend all natural rights to all persons. Slavery and indentured servitude continued in fledgling United States and neither nation extended full rights to women or indigenous populations.

The concept of human rights as it is now understood emerged in the twentieth century after World War II (1938–1945). Outraged by the horrors of war and the Holocaust, the newly-formed United Nations addressed issues such as torture, warfare against civilians, the treatment of prisoners of war, and the prosecution of war criminals, setting forth new rules for warfare that protected basic rights. In 1948, the member states of the United Nations drafted the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Since the adoption of the declaration, the UN, national governments, and independent organizations have worked to advance, promote, and enforce human rights throughout the world.

The fundamental structure of this book is based on the rights enumerated in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is featured in three articles in this chapter. The major principles of the declaration are the basis of international humanitarian law. Even though the document is non-binding, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the best-known and most widely translated modern statement of human rights.