Over the centuries, in all the world’s civilizations, the idea of universal human rights has evolved based on notions of dignity and respect. However, it took many generations for the idea of respect for rights to be enshrined in law. It is often historical experience that drives us to elevate human rights to the rank of law. And this, of course, is not the end of the road. As our knowledge of the history of other cultures is enriched, we will undoubtedly find historical evidence of attempts to legislate human rights in other cultures as well.
In 1215, the English nobility and the clergy, by adopting the Magna Carta, compelled the king of England to rule by law. The Charter protected mainly the rights of a privileged class (the nobility), so we are not talking about human rights as such here. But the charter became a document that people often cited to protect their freedoms because it limited royal power and recognized people’s freedoms and rights.
In 1689 the English Parliament passed a law declaring that it would no longer tolerate royal interference in its affairs. This document, known as the Bill of Rights, forbade the monarch to suspend laws without the consent of parliament, stipulated the free election of members of parliament, and declared that freedom of speech in parliament could not be challenged in the courts or elsewhere.
Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) is widely known as the founder of the science of international law. In his book On the Law of War and Peace, he presented a system of general principles based on “natural law,” which he believed should unite all nations, regardless of local laws and customs. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some European philosophers continued to develop the concept of “natural rights.”
John Locke (1689) developed the theory that everyone has some rights from birth, and they are not granted by governments or their laws. The legitimacy of government depends, in fact, on the extent to which it respects these natural rights. The idea that certain legal guarantees should flow from natural human rights has become increasingly recognized and reflected in the constitutions of a number of countries. Human rights reformulated this idea into a system of relationships between governments and citizens.
In 1776, most of the British colonies in North America declared their independence from the British Empire by adopting the Declaration of Independence of the United States. The Declaration was largely based on Locke’s and Montesquieu’s theories of the “natural rights” of man. Founded on the belief that at the heart of everything is the protection of liberties by the power of the state, the Declaration stood up for such concepts as: inalienable right, protection of human rights, freedom of speech, press, petition and assembly, right to privacy, to a fair trial; equality before the law and freedom of religion.
The purpose of any political union is to secure the natural and inalienable rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, 1789, France
In 1789 the French overthrew the monarchy in their country and established the first French Republic. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was born of the Revolution and was written by members of the clergy, nobility, and ordinary citizens, who thus implemented the ideas of prominent enlighteners such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, the encyclopedists, and Rousseau. The Declaration sharply criticized the political and legal system of the monarchy, and defined “liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression” as natural human rights. The Declaration replaced the system of aristocratic privileges that had existed under the monarchy with the principle of equality before the law. But it took a long time to put its egalitarian principles and concepts of equal rights into practice. There was deep injustice in society at the time, and it took the efforts of several generations to make the declaration a reality.