human rights history essay

History Cooperative

The Evolution, Growth, and History of Human Rights

The history of human rights isn’t that simple. The concept has been around for eons, really, but inalienable rights are only a recent development. Just how recent? Well, the legal recognition of human rights within the international community wasn’t until the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Even still, the moral principles that constitute our fundamental rights are rich in history. Global leaders and government officials in 1948 didn’t just wake up one day thinking, “Wow, the last six years sucked for humanity, we need to do something about it.” No, the steps towards securing mankind’s fundamental freedoms have been growing over generations.

Everything grows from something. As Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Violence begets violence; hate begets hate; and toughness begets a greater toughness.” What is put out into the world comes back to us tenfold. That being said, why not have love beget love; empathy beget empathy; and respect begets greater respect?

Table of Contents

The History of Human Rights: What are Human Rights?

The history of human rights is a complex and evolving narrative that spans centuries and is deeply intertwined with the development of societies, cultures, and philosophical thought.

Human rights are the collective rights of everyone. Every member of the “human family” is entitled to several fundamental freedoms and rights. This includes – but is not limited to – multiple civil and political rights, economic, social, and cultural rights, and environmental rights. In short, human rights can best be described as the most basic rights of mankind.

The United Nations describes human rights as the “rights inherent to all human beings, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other status.” Therefore, human rights are both universal and undeniable. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you are from. In the eyes of the United Nations, you have rights that are worth protecting and enforcing.

Everybody has human rights: you, your grandma, and your weird neighbor included. It is the preservation and implementation of these rights on such a massive, international scale when things get tricky.

Types of Human Rights

There are a handful of human rights. There are five “themes” of human rights that the rest fall beneath.

Types of human rights include…

• Economic rights
• Social rights
• Political rights
• Civil rights
• Cultural rights

These five themes of human rights encapsulate the collective rights of humanity. Though they may not be much to look at at a glance, there is a lot to them. Each theme can be broken down into countless categories and sub-categories. As the years have gone on, the list of human rights only grew (albeit slowly).

Violations of Human Rights

There is not a person on this earth that can be denied their rights as a human being. Right? Unfortunately, that is where things can get complicated.

It is painful to admit, but human rights are a new thing. They may have entertained the thoughts of rulers of ages past, or been explored through the eyes of philosophers many years ago; however, the fundamental rights of mankind have only been established within the last hundred years.

You would think it would be a no-brainer to treat folk with inherent dignity. However, when push comes to shove (or in times of strife), it is easy to lose sight of who we are and what we stand for. War, economic collapses, and ecological and natural disasters can all become a slippery slope into human rights abuses.

As human beings, we are born with rights that supersede state, country, or creed. When these rights are violated – oftentimes in the name of governance, extremism, and war – it is up to everyone to hold offenders accountable. Notably, the government is charged with holding itself accountable as well which…can get complicated if the government is acting in its own self-interest. That is where the international community comes into play.

A History of Human Rights: 539 BC to the 21st-Century

Human rights aren’t new, but their legality is. Such is especially true for universal human rights, which were only adopted in 1948 after one of history’s bloodiest wars. Since then, only limited progress has been made toward expanding, respecting, and enforcing human rights.

Much of the time, the evolution of human rights can be described by generations. The first-generation rights (civil and political rights) are theorized to have begun in the 17th- and 18th centuries. Pretty much, people should have a say in what policies will affect them. These rights also offer protections against violations of state.

Second-generation rights focus more on the social, economic, and cultural rights of individuals. How people live and work together became a hot topic during the Industrial Revolution and the burgeoning working class. On the other hand, third-generation rights are known as solidarity rights. These would include the right to a healthy environment and the right to peace among other things.

539 BCE – Cyrus the Great and Basic Freedoms

Cyrus the Great was the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, which stretched from the Aegean Sea to the Indus River. Cyrus was also a phenomenal military strategist; all of this, however, was not necessarily what made Cyrus…well, great .

What defined the reign of Cyrus more than anything was his treatment of the lands he conquered. He respected the cultures, religions, and customs of the many, many lands he inducted into his growing empire. There was no forced assimilation, no denouncing of local religions, and an emphasis was placed on tolerance. Today, Cyrus is viewed as a benevolent leader who championed religious minorities in conquered regions.

Part of why Cyrus has such a sparkling interpretation is the Cyrus Cylinder . The cylinder acts as a record of Cyrus’ 539 BCE conquest of ancient Babylon. Apparently, upon arriving in Babylon, Cyrus the Great declared himself chosen by Marduk, the chief city god . Doing such made him positively stand out compared to the king he had deposed.

READ MORE: Ancient Civilizations Timeline: The Complete List from Aboriginals to Incans

The king, Nabonidus, turned out to be in the middle of an (unpopular) religious reformation with the moon god Sîn at its helm. Despite such reformations taking place successfully in the past, Marduk was a popular god amongst the ancient Babylonians. Cyrus’ open worship of the revered deity had him quickly gain traction with common and high-born Babylonians alike.

Later interpretations of the Cyrus Cylinder suggest that Cyrus freed Babylonian slaves, although slavery was continued throughout Achaemeniad rulership. The historicity of this event is debated, though supported in the Book of Ezra which states that Cyrus ended the Babylonian exile. Whatever the true interpretation of the Cyrus Cylinder, Cyrus is still credited with being the first to establish basic freedoms.

1215 – The Magna Carta and Rule of Law

Ancient leaders afforded their subjects certain rights. Though no international bill, the running of ancient empires and societies – and what they viewed as human rights – is nothing to scoff at. Many rulers (good ones at least) did acknowledge the legal obligation that came with leading. That being said, Magna Carta, anyone?

The signing of the Magna Carta is one of the most famous stories in history. After all, it was the first significant record of the rule of law. The Magna Carta (also called “The Great Charter”) establishes that the monarch and their government are not above the law. While it didn’t necessarily propel human rights forward, the Magna Carta was a big deal.

It wasn’t peasants that forced King John’s hand, but rather feudal lords – barons, in this case – that threatened civil war. They were angry about the rise in taxes to fund bitterly unsuccessful wars in France. The tax spike was viewed as a clear exploitation of power by the king. Therefore, to avoid royal infringement on their finances, the barons grouped up and made a heavy-handed threat to the monarch.

Though the Magna Carta was signed, King John did later reach out to the Pope to negate the document’s legal status. You know, looking for any loophole out of a binding agreement…just as someone looking to exploit their power would. Anyways, doing so led to England ’s First Barons’ War, which lasted two years.

READ MORE: The Kings and Queens of England: English Monarchs Timeline from William the Conqueror to Elizabeth II

1625 – Hugo Grotius and International Law

Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) is considered the father of international law. So, you’ve probably guessed it: the consensus is that Grotius laid the foundations of modern international law. He was a Dutch juror, a poet, and a massive fan of Greek and Roman philosophy.

In the groundbreaking novel On the Laws of War and Peace (1625), Grotius boldly attempts to find a middle ground between natural law and the laws of nations. Accordingly, the most-favored idealist view is counteractive, but absolute realism is also unacceptable. Wars will happen, but the standard of warfare is determined by international law; likewise, the treatment of minorities is up to review from the international stage. Grotian tradition “views international policies as taking place within an international society” according to A. Claire Cutler in Review of International Studies .

Grotius, therefore, establishes that there are certain human rights that are unwaveringly fundamental to human beings. These rights are then vital to understanding human nature. Then, international laws somewhat based on human nature are, to a degree, completely valid.

Much of Grotian tradition and the themes that Grotius had discussed in his lifetime became blueprints for modern international human rights law. He vaunted non-intervention policies but agreed that another country could step in against tyrannical rule on behalf of the citizens. This would be because of human dignity rather than any personal gain.

1689 – English Bill of Rights

The English Bill of Rights is best known as the document that establishes Parliamentary privilege. However, there is a lot more to this piece of parchment than just that! The English Bill of Rights stated that there could be no taxation without representation (in Parliament), freedom from government interference, the right to petition, and equal treatment in the court system. Furthermore, other human rights were granted to civilians, such as no cruel and unusual punishment and the right to free speech.

If that sounds familiar to all of you Americans reading, it’s because it is.

The whole “no taxation without representation” theme was a major point of contention within the British-American colonies leading up to the Revolutionary War. British colonies did not have appropriate representatives in Parliament. Agents, sure, but not sufficient representatives that could challenge the British majority. Additionally, when drafting the United States Bill of Rights , government officials definitely looked to the English Bill of Rights for some inspiration.

As it turns out, the populace wasn’t too keen on giving the a-OK to a fledgling government with no guarantee of personal liberty. They rightfully didn’t want British monarchy 2.0, so not many Anti-Federalists (nay to national governments) were willing to ratify the Constitution. This left Federalists (yay to the national government) in a sticky situation. The Federalists added the Bill of Rights to make the Constitution more appealing to the opposition.

1789 – The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the French Revolution

The French Revolution was a major upheaval of the feudal system in France. It was a crazy time to be alive and the French Revolution left a lot of European monarchies wiping their brow. The American Revolution – a major source of inspiration for French peasantry – ended a mere 6 years before. And, unlike their American counterparts, the French Revolution was thrice as bloody.

When examining the French Revolution, it is crucial to consider what events led up to it. Again, everything grows from something. Right off the bat, some members of society were granted more rights than others. The Estate System effectively shot down an individual’s right to self-determination and grossly limited their economic rights.

Speaking of economic rights, the economy sucked . The two higher Estates (the First and Second) relied on the taxation of the Third Estate for their livelihood. The Third Estate, composed of the working class, could not afford necessities.

If the bread riots in Paris were bad, then the famine rampant throughout the countryside was horrible. Also, absolutism – the idea that the monarchy has complete, unchallenged control over an entire country – didn’t help at all .

So, the people of France began turning to Enlightenment ideals. The Age of Enlightenment, which emphasized the value of individual liberty and religious tolerance, inspired the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The Declaration was drafted by American Revolution veteran Marquis de Lafayette and clergyman Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes, both of whom ironically belonged to the Second and First Estates.

Article I of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen reads as follows: “Human Beings are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be founded only on the common good.” Such an open declaration of human rights ignited a spark in many Frenchmen, women, and children who had felt disenfranchised by their system of government.

1791 – The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights

The end of the Revolutionary War in the United States was a trying period in the nation’s history. No one was quite certain what they wanted when they wiped their hands clean of British rule; they just knew they didn’t want that . Thus, emerged the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists.

The Federalists wanted a national government whereas Anti-Federalists preferred smaller, self-governing states. There was a massive and very real fear that a big government could lead the new country down the same hole they just dug themselves out of.

The United States Constitution was initially introduced to outline the systems of government that the Articles of Confederation (1777) lacked. It was introduced to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Other Convention topics included state representation in Congress, presidential powers, and the slave trade. The main issue with the Constitution is that it focused only on governmental powers and branches, but not the rights of the people.

READ MORE: Slavery in America: United States’ Black Mark

Which is important when you are trying to assert federal control over them. As the Magna Carta taught us (which the French Bourbon dynasty could have learned from) the government is not above the law. The Federalists needed to think of something to reel the Anti-Feds to their side.

This is where the Bill of Rights comes in. Ten amendments were added to the U.S. Constitution, which collectively became known as the Bill of Rights. These amendments, which guarantee the “certain unalienable Rights” of the Declaration of Independence are still a topic of debate today. While 27 more amendments have been added to the original ratification in 1791, only the first 10 are known as the Bill of Rights.

1919 – Peace Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations

The events of World War I (WWI) shocked the international community. It was the Great War: the “war to end all wars.” Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case.

READ MORE: What Caused World War 1? Political, Imperialistic, and Nationalistic Factors

World War I was a period of rapid advancements in warfare. Tanks , chemical weaponry, flamethrowers, and machine guns were all developed in the shadow of the very first world war. Furthermore, violations of human rights were plentiful.

In various countries – the United States included – opposition to the war could lead to jail time. Civilians were court-martialed and sent to military prisons for speech deemed “disloyal.” In Canada, the War Measures Act was introduced, giving the federal government power to suspend all rights of citizens. Meanwhile, 100,000 civilians in France and Belgium were detained by German forces, only to be sent against their will as forced labor in Germany.

So, at the end of the war, drafting a peace treaty was only one of the many hurdles that nations had to contend with. The biggest issue is that no one could agree on how to treat Germany and other Central powers. What ended up happening was a significant stripping of territory, a reduction of military forces, and a reparations bill that was astronomical. The peace that came with the Treaty of Versailles was fragile at best.

From the treaty came the League of Nations , founded by the 28th U.S. President, Woodrow Wilson. In all, 63 countries were a part of the League: this was a majority of sovereign nations in 1920. The League of Nations was the first international congregation of nations and was developed to help achieve international peace.

At some point, Japan had introduced a clause to the treaty that – if approved – would’ve established racial equality within the League of Nations. The U.S. and a number of British dominions rejected the amendment. Despite this fumble, the League of Nations managed to develop organizations that did positively propel human rights forward.

International Labor Organization

The International Labor Organization ( ILO ) was founded by the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. It became a mainstay in the later United Nations. As it stands, the International Labor Organization safeguards social and economic rights by setting international labor standards.

Much of the foundation of the ILO is based on 19th-century social and labor movements. These movements brought international attention to the plights of workers. After World War I, the beliefs of these movements became revitalized as the demand for social justice and a higher standard of living for the working classes emerged.

In the wake of WWI, the International Labor Organization proved especially helpful for developing countries. Among these, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Poland all were considered separated from Russian claims per the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The benefit of the ILO would again be proved in developing countries after WWII. Then, numerous countries were freed from colonial rule including India, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

Protection of Minorities

Humanitarian conditions were not a driving principle sought to be upheld by the League of Nations. Instead, the League was formed to maintain the status quo following the Allied victory in World War I ( Justifications of Minority Protections in International Law , 1997). That being said, the legitimate international concern of another world war happening did provide substantial reasoning to address some amount of human rights.

The administrative branch of the League of Nations, the International Secretariat, included a Minorities Section in the early years. The Minorities Section dealt with the protections of minorities in relevant nations, particularly those newly formed in Eastern Europe.

Before the formation of the Secretariat and its Minorities Section, the rights of minorities that found themselves aloft in war-torn Eastern Europe were ambiguous at best. It was the Minorities Section that developed “a procedural and bureaucratic structure that untangled the League’s…mandate…guaranteeing the rights of some twenty-five million racial, religious, and linguistic minorities” as stated by Thomas Smejkal in his thesis, “ Protection in Practice: The Minorities Section of the League of Nations Secretariat, 1919-1934 .” For a time, the Section was somewhat successful at addressing inequalities experienced by minorities. It was not until later that the overall weaknesses of the League – such as lack of representation – proved to be an issue in the face of World War II.

With World War II came numerous human rights abuses, with those hit hardest being certain minority groups in Eastern Europe. Without significant world powers (the United States, Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy, Japan, and Spain) it became increasingly difficult to ensure personal liberty for minorities.

1945 – Post-WWII and the United Nations  

World War II, as with the First World War, saw a slew of human rights violations. To be fair, most wars – major and minor – are breeding grounds for such infringements. Supposed “gentlemen wars” are a thing of the past, if not nearer to pure fantasy.

The United Nations was founded in 1945, a month after the end of World War II . To say there was global devastation would be an understatement: roughly 3% of the world’s population died.

Furthermore, a new horror was realized in the later months of 1945. The United States developed and dropped two atomic bombs in the largely civilian-populated cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. The bombing led to the end of the Pacific Theater, with legal experts and scholars still debating whether or not the dual bombings were war crimes.

Though the threat of weapons of mass destruction was real, the United Nations didn’t immediately act against them. It was not until 1968 that the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was signed. Even later still was the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) was signed, which didn’t happen until 2017. Currently, the use of weapons of mass destruction is considered a violation of human rights.

After WWII, there was new hope for achieving international peace. The League of Nations, now null and void, was rebranded as the United Nations. In fact, the Charter of the United Nations was signed while World War II was still raging on and the development of the UN began back in 1943 during the pivotal Tehran Conference. During this time, the League of Nations wasn’t completely obsolete, but it was just barely functioning.

The United Nations expanded significantly on human rights and humanitarian laws. Like its predecessor, its primary goal is bolstering international peace.

The United Nations Charter

The United Nations Charter is the founding document of the U.N., signed in 1945. The Charter itself is considered to be an international treaty, legally binding involving countries to oblige by any laws passed. Since its initial signing in 1945, the United Nations Charter has been amended three times.

Commission of Human Rights

One of the more significant creations post-WWII is the Commission of Human Rights . Emerging in 1946, the Commission is responsible for protecting fundamental freedoms. There are numerous themes that the Commission of Human Rights handles.

Anything from the right to self-determination to indigenous issues is discussed by the Commission. Moreover, they look into both human rights violations worldwide and in specific countries. It is the Commission of Human Rights that primarily sets standards for human rights for the international community.

An example is the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The Commission opens the declaration with the recognition “of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.” Right off the bat, the Commission acknowledges that there are certain fundamental human rights that must be recognized. The inclusion of civil and political rights, and economic, social, and cultural rights, among others, have been later added per the Commission.

1948 – Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a significant landmark in the history of human rights. It has acted as a model document for several “domestic constitutions, laws, regulations, and policies” according to Hurst Hannum in “ The UDHR in National and International Law ” ( Health and Human Rights , 1998). Despite this, the UDHR is not a legally binding document; at least not in whole. However, the Declaration has been incorporated into most constitutions of the nations belonging to the UN.

All things considered, the UDHR is a customary international law. Everyone understands, acknowledges, and respects the Declaration (at least those 193 states and countries within the United Nations). It was drafted for bolstering international peace, after all.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights essentially acts as a guide to human rights norms. It has alternatively been referred to as the international Magna Carta since it sets a standard for how a government treats its own citizens. Thus, the treatment of a government’s citizens towards its own citizens became everybody ’s business.

Since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been signed, the U.N. has called out numerous governments for their citizen abuses. To be honest, the United Nations is still pointing out government infringements on human rights. One of the most historically significant times the United Nations has done this was during apartheid in South Africa.

In 1962, the U.N. condemned South Africa’s racial discrimination and bigoted laws, even going as far as calling for members to cut economic and military ties with the country. Unfortunately, not many Western countries were willing to end economic relations, even after apartheid became a crime against humanity in 1973.

1949 – International Humanitarian Law

Another international law signed in the aftermath of World War II is the International Humanitarian Law (IHL). These laws are intended to limit the effects of armed conflict and offer protections for those uninvolved in hostilities. Additionally, the IHL puts restrictions on the methods of warfare and the treatment of prisoners of war. Most – if not all – themes of the IHL had been adopted from the four Geneva Conventions of 1949.

Geneva Conventions of 1949

The Geneva Conventions of 1949 prohibit specific abuses during warfare. Three separate protocols have been added to the International Humanitarian Law, two in 1977 and one in 2005 respectively. These supplemental protocols give rights to certain minority groups in times of war.

The first of the Geneva Conventions gives protection to soldiers who are removed from the ongoing conflict. This Convention deals largely with the sick and wounded and the retention of their human rights. Meanwhile, the second Geneva Convention expands on the first, extending rights to naval combatants and ship-bound non-combatants. The second Convention also clarifies that “shipwrecked” includes those who parachute from damaged aircraft (Articles 12 and 18).

The third Geneva Convention sets standards for the treatment of prisoners of war. The Convention emphasizes that POWs are to be treated with basic human dignity. This means that degrading treatment is effectively illegal (as stated in Articles 13, 14, and 16). Also, it clarifies who is considered to be war prisoners.

Members of the armed forces, militia volunteers, and civilians in the company of armed forces are all considered to be prisoners of war. Therefore, the rights of POWs are extended to civilians under certain circumstances. Particularly those civilians involved in resistance movements and non-combatants, such as medics or chaplains, can be viewed as POWs.

The fourth Geneva Convention is an expansion to the rights and treatment of civilians in occupied land or conflict areas. Generally, civilians are to retain their civil and political rights. An example of this is addressed in Article 40, which states that civilians cannot be forced to do military-related work for occupying forces. More importantly, civilians are protected from murder, torture, or brutality; and from discrimination based on race, nationality, religion, or political opinion (Articles 13 and 32).

1954-1976 – The Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Civil Rights Movements  

More was happening in the ’60s than just the musical British Invasion. It was the middle of the Cold War , a “bloodless war,” where the United States and the Soviet Union were at each other’s throats from 1947 to 1991. So much for global peace.

READ MORE: Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy

The two nations got involved in a series of proxy wars, never directly assaulting the other. The most famous of these proxy wars, the Korean War (1950-1954) and the Vietnam War (1955-1975) were unpopular and viewed as “senseless” by the masses. They were only two out of upwards of 11 proxy wars.

During these terribly unpopular wars, the Civil Rights Movement was speeding up in the United States. In truth, it is impossible to argue for being a beacon of democracy if you oppress minorities in your own country. Thus, the Civil Rights era saw a boom in individuals demanding civil and political rights; economic, social, and cultural rights were also at the forefront.

The Civil Rights Movement was largely connected to the generational trauma of Black Americans caused by the horrors of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. As of the ’60s, only very limited progress had been made from the Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War. For generations , an entire demographic of the American population was denied collective rights afforded to them by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights back in 1948.

Other minority groups within (and outside of the United States) took note. Civil Rights inspired a human rights movement among Native Americans, Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, women, and members of the LGBTQ community. Additionally, Northern Ireland was inspired to lead protests against the British occupation of Northern Ireland. These protests led to the Northern Ireland Conflict (the Troubles) and the creation of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) is a legally binding international document drafted in 1954. However, the ICCPR was not signed until 1966. It took another decade for it to become effective in 1976.

A ton of stuff happened within those two decades that could have benefitted from such a document, but we digress. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is viewed as an international human rights law. It ensures that those belonging to mankind (i.e. human beings), have certain political rights as citizens and are treated with basic human dignity. Overall, the ICCPR asserts that people are entitled to specific personal liberties that cannot be denied by government entities.

International Covenant of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights

The International Covenant of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) was another international bill that would have made a huge impact if put into effect the same year it was drafted. The ICESCR was developed alongside the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It was also signed and made effective in the same years as the ICCPR. As its title suggests, the ICESCR is intended to promote economic development, all while providing citizens with social and cultural rights.

Compared to other human rights laws of the past, the International Covenant of Economic Social and Cultural Rights has made significant progress for Indigenous Peoples. The identification of cultural rights specifically as human rights has positively impacted other minority groups as well, including the Roma.

Human Rights in the 21st Century

As the Commission of Human Rights states: “Human rights standards have little value if they are not implemented.” Although there have been countless standards, laws, and treaties passed by the United Nations since World War II, the international community has struggled with implementation. Furthermore, since the perception of human rights is constantly evolving, past acts – slavery, racial discrimination, and nuclear weapons to name a few – are now considered to be human rights violations. While these are all terrible acts (and always have been terrible acts) the argument arises that, at the time of practice, these were not considered to be violations. Do, then, past offenders be treated as such? 

The United Nations Human Rights Council has done groundbreaking work at driving the human rights evolution. In that there is no denying. Even still, more work could be done to provide everyone across the globe with equal and inalienable rights.

The internet – a Wild West type of medium – still requires users to uphold human rights; however, it is maintaining human rights in this rapidly evolving environment that’s tricky. Likewise, environmental protections are an extension of the human right to a healthy environment. They are only recent developments.

With everything happening in the world right now, there is legitimate international concern regarding the state of human rights. Only recently has Twitter ’s human rights team been cut from the company. Not to mention the humanitarian crises occurring in parts of Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, and the United States.

Human rights are ever-growing, desperately attempting to keep up with changing times. What has been defined as human rights norms today may always be expanded upon tomorrow.

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• Introduction

Origins in ancient Greece and Rome

• Natural law transformed into natural rights
• “Nonsense upon stilts”: the critics of natural rights
• The persistence of the notion
• The nature of human rights: commonly accepted postulates
• Liberté : civil and political rights
• Égalité : economic, social, and cultural rights
• Fraternité : solidarity or group rights
• Liberté versus égalité
• The relevance of custom and tradition: the universalist-relativist debate
• Inherent risks in the debate
• Developments before World War II
• The UN Commission on Human Rights and its instruments
• The UN Human Rights Council and its instruments
• Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
• The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Its Optional Protocols
• Other UN human rights conventions and declarations
• Human rights and the Helsinki process
• Human rights in Europe
• Human rights in the Americas
• Human rights in Africa
• Human rights in the Arab world
• Human rights in Asia
• International human rights in domestic courts
• Human rights in the early 21st century

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• Table Of Contents

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human rights , rights that belong to an individual or group of individuals simply for being human, or as a consequence of inherent human vulnerability, or because they are requisite to the possibility of a just society. Whatever their theoretical justification, human rights refer to a wide continuum of values or capabilities thought to enhance human agency or protect human interests and declared to be universal in character, in some sense equally claimed for all human beings, present and future.

It is a common observation that human beings everywhere require the realization of diverse values or capabilities to ensure their individual and collective well-being. It also is a common observation that this requirement—whether conceived or expressed as a moral or a legal demand—is often painfully frustrated by social as well as natural forces, resulting in exploitation, oppression, persecution, and other forms of deprivation. Deeply rooted in these twin observations are the beginnings of what today are called “human rights” and the national and international legal processes associated with them.

Historical development

The expression human rights is relatively new, having come into everyday parlance only since World War II , the founding of the United Nations in 1945, and the adoption by the UN General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. It replaced the phrase natural rights, which fell into disfavour in the 19th century in part because the concept of natural law (to which it was intimately linked) had become controversial with the rise of legal positivism . Legal positivism rejected the theory, long espoused by the Roman Catholic Church , that law must be moral to be law. The term human rights also replaced the later phrase the rights of Man, which was not universally understood to include the rights of women.

Most students of human rights trace the origins of the concept of human rights to ancient Greece and Rome , where it was closely tied to the doctrines of the Stoics , who held that human conduct should be judged according to, and brought into harmony with, the law of nature . A classic example of this view is given in Sophocles ’ play Antigone , in which the title character, upon being reproached by King Creon for defying his command not to bury her slain brother, asserted that she acted in accordance with the immutable laws of the gods.

In part because Stoicism played a key role in its formation and spread, Roman law similarly allowed for the existence of a natural law and with it—pursuant to the jus gentium (“law of nations”)—certain universal rights that extended beyond the rights of citizenship. According to the Roman jurist Ulpian , for example, natural law was that which nature, not the state, assures to all human beings, Roman citizens or not.

It was not until after the Middle Ages , however, that natural law became associated with natural rights. In Greco-Roman and medieval times, doctrines of natural law concerned mainly the duties, rather than the rights, of “Man.” Moreover, as evidenced in the writings of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas , these doctrines recognized the legitimacy of slavery and serfdom and, in so doing, excluded perhaps the most important ideas of human rights as they are understood today—freedom (or liberty) and equality .

The conception of human rights as natural rights (as opposed to a classical natural order of obligation) was made possible by certain basic societal changes, which took place gradually beginning with the decline of European feudalism from about the 13th century and continuing through the Renaissance to the Peace of Westphalia (1648). During this period, resistance to religious intolerance and political and economic bondage; the evident failure of rulers to meet their obligations under natural law; and the unprecedented commitment to individual expression and worldly experience that was characteristic of the Renaissance all combined to shift the conception of natural law from duties to rights. The teachings of Aquinas and Hugo Grotius on the European continent, the Magna Carta (1215) and its companion Charter of the Forests (1217), the Petition of Right (1628), and the English Bill of Rights (1689) in England were signs of this change. Each testified to the increasingly popular view that human beings are endowed with certain eternal and inalienable rights that never were renounced when humankind “contracted” to enter the social order from the natural order and never were diminished by the claim of the “ divine right of kings .”

The complex origins, development, and meanings of human rights

By Eric D. Weitz June 14, 2022

In 2015, a young girl and her father crossed into the United States from the border with Mexico. Astrid and Arturo, K’iche’ Indians from Guatemala, were fleeing the systematic discrimination and violence their people have suffered for decades. US officials detained Astrid and Arturo for only one day. They had applied for political asylum and were allowed to move on. They began to build a life in Pennsylvania as they awaited the decision on their asylum status. Three years later, in 2018, US immigration authorities raided their home in the middle of the night and arrested them. Human rights lawyers argued that Astrid and Arturo were unjustly detained. Amnesty International launched a campaign to free them. The authorities were deluged with nearly two thousand phone calls and tens of thousands of petitions demanding their release. The calls and petitions arrived from nearly every continent on the globe. Officials relented, and after a month set father and daughter free. For now. Their status as asylum seekers has, as of autumn 2018, still not been finally decided. 1  

One story from one family among the more than 68.5 million migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees in the world today. 2  Yet the experiences of Astrid and Arturo speak to the three questions that animate this book: Who has access to rights? What do we mean by human rights? And how do we obtain rights? 

Human rights are never as simple as we might think from reading, say, the preamble and thirty articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). That is precisely the point of  A World Divided . I aim not just to celebrate human rights (although I do most definitely support them), but to explore their complex origins, development, and meanings since the eighteenth century. I do so by examining the histories of various nation-states and one federation of nationalities (the Soviet Union) and the human rights they proclaimed. I have chosen these particular cases, culled from around the globe over the past two and one-half centuries, because they encompass the variety of modern political and economic systems, from republic to empire, slavery to socialism, colonialism to communism. 

Human rights offer people around the world the prospects of expansive, liberty-endowed, self-determining lives, despite the violations, deprivations, and atrocities we still witness on virtually every continent. Even where they exist only as promises and hopes, human rights stand as a triumph of the human spirit and intellect. Where implemented, they protect us from the arbitrary power of the state. They assure us that policemen cannot enter our homes unless granted a warrant, and no government agency can arbitrarily seize the property we own. Every time individuals around the globe go to a polling place to pull a lever or scratch an X to choose the representatives of their choice, wherever people raise their voices in meetings and rallies or in letters to their local newspaper, they are exercising rights of free speech that make them participants of the worlds they inhabit, whether it be their local village or town or country. Whenever people demand clean water or adequate healthcare, they are expressing their social rights. Through all these activities, they are no longer mere objects who are ordered about or moved around at someone’s whim, nor subjects who, if fate treats them well, receive benefits from those above them. Rights give people power in the best sense of the term—the ability to shape their own lives and the societies in which they live. Rights enhance our capacity to be more fully human. 

In our divided world of 193 sovereign nation-states, we have rights first and foremost as national citizens. But who, in fact, constitutes the nation and by what criteria? Were Arturo and Astrid, as Indians, national citizens and therefore able to exercise rights in Guatemala? Who has the “right to have rights”?—as Hannah Arendt, and the German Enlightenment philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte before her, asked. 3  Access to rights in the nation-state is the first major theme of this book. From Greek rebels in the early nineteenth century to anticolonial Africans in the twentieth, all had to face the questions: Who belongs to the nation? Who qualifies to be a rights-bearing citizen, and what kinds of rights may he or she possess? What happens to those who live within the territory of the new nation-state but are somehow different from the dominant group, whether by virtue of skin color, religion, language, or any other trait? This quandary remains with us today, as Arturo and Astrid know all too well. 

A World Divided  affirms the powerful and creative history of human rights from the late eighteenth century to the present. It also presents a critique of the  limitations  of rights, so long as they are based in the nation-state and national or racial citizenship. 4  In fact, the book takes the problem one step further: the great paradox of the history presented here is that nation-states create rights for some at the same time that they exclude others, at times quite brutally. The state is our protector; it is also our greatest threat. 5  This dilemma, that the state, at its best, enforces human rights, but at the same time limits the circle of those who can possess rights, is our history as well as our present and future. As far as anyone can imagine, we will continue to inhabit a world of 193 sovereign independent states (give or take one, two, or three). 

Only since 1945 has the emergence of international human rights offered a model of universal rights beyond the nation-state. The UDHR, passed by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly on 10 December 1948, proclaims that rights inhere in everyone regardless of national citizenship. Scores of international treaties confirm the point that even the stateless possess human rights and therefore need to be protected by states and the international community. 6  Asylum seekers, like Arturo and Astrid, are especially protected, and they at least were released from detention after one month. Every step that moves the protection of human rights to the international level, however partial and limited, constitutes, I argue, a major advance, the best-laid path out of the quandaries and limitations of human rights based exclusively in national citizenship. 7  

Nonetheless, in the vast majority of cases we are still dependent on the nation-state to establish and enforce human rights, or are compelled to fight the nation-state as the supreme violator of rights. Activists around the globe appeal to international human rights standards. But their first station stop is their own state, which they call upon to ensure free speech, provide clean water, and rein in paramilitaries who wreak havoc on populations. 8  

One truth about human rights is incontrovertible (and it may be the only truth): they are dynamic. Their meaning has evolved over the past two and one-half centuries, and that is the second theme pursued in this book. Once reserved for some people—propertied men, white Europeans, loyal Soviets—they were quickly demanded by those who had been excluded. Activists turned the rhetoric and law of rights against those who reigned, and demanded a free and open, more inclusive society. We shall see this phenomenon at work time and again, in Brazil, the Soviet Union, South Korea, and Rwanda and Burundi, and in other histories explored in each of the chapters. We shall also see it at work internationally, notably in the movement for women’s rights after 1945. 

As the charmed circle of rights-bearing citizens expanded, so did the meaning of those rights. In the nineteenth century, new states were primarily liberal in character. They proclaimed political rights, like the right to free speech and assembly and protection from unwarranted search and seizure, but provided little to nothing in the way of social rights. 9  Yet already by the mid-nineteenth century, socialists, feminists, and some liberals raised the objection that rights conceived solely in political terms ignored the great needs and desires of the vast majority of the population. 10  

Today, most scholars and activists insist that the political rights derived from the great revolutions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries must be complemented by social and economic rights. The UN said as much in 1966 by passing the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (the United States, though a signatory, has never ratified the treaty). The Guatemalan Constitution, like so many others around the globe, conforms to this understanding. 11  Its section on “Human Rights,” primarily political in orientation, is immediately followed by one on “Social Rights.” Had the state come anywhere close to following its own prescriptions, Arturo and Astrid would have been able to speak out freely and express their cultural identity, and would have had access to healthcare and education—the full complement of human rights as understood today. 

This essay is an excerpt from  A World Divided: The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States by  Eric D. Weitz .

About the Author

Eric D. Weitz  (1953–2021) was Distinguished Professor of History at City College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He was also the author of  Weimar Germany: Promise and   Tragedy , which was named a  New York Times Book Review  Editor’s Choice;  A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation;  and  Creating German   Communism, 1890–1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State  (all Princeton).

1. I take this story from the Amnesty International website: “I Welcome: Protecting the Rights of Refugees and Asylum-Seekers,” n.d., accessed 13 August 2018, https://www.amnestyusa.org/campaigns/refugee-and-migrant-rights/, and “Help Release 15-Year-Old Astrid and Her Father,” n.d., accessed 13 August 2018, https://act.amnestyusa.org/page/21189/action/1. 

2. Figure from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, “Figures at a Glance,” n.d., accessed 13 August 2018, http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html. 

3. Hannah Arendt,  The Origins of Totalitarianism  (1951; Cleveland: Meridian, 1958), 296. Arendt’s formulation, “the right to have rights,” is uncannily close to Fichte’s: “The one true right that belongs to the human being as such [is]: the right to be able to acquire rights.” See Johann Gottlieb Fichte,  Foundations of Natural Right, according to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre , ed. Frederick Neuhouser, trans. Michael Baur (1796; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 333. Arendt makes no reference to Fichte’s formulation, nor do any of the major Arendt scholars. 

The German original: “Dies allein is das eigentliche Menschenrecht, das den [dem, editor] Menschen, als Menschen, zukommt; die Möglichkeit sich Rechte zu erwerben.” Johann Gottlieb Fichte,  Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Principien der Wissenschaftslehre  (1796), in  J. G. Fichte: Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften , ed. Reinhard Lauth and Hans Gliwitzky, pt. 1, vol. 4,  Werke 1797–1798  (Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1970), 163. 

4. I do not, however, share the withering criticisms of some recent authors, who tell us that human rights are on the wane; have altogether failed; are utopian in character and therefore undermine the real and necessary world of politics, which has to be about limited goals; divert attention from more critical social issues, like inequality; or are Western-based and therefore necessarily imperialist in character. See, for example, Samuel Moyn,  Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World  (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018), and  The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History  (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010); Eric A. Posner,  The Twilight of Human Rights Law  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Stephen Hopgood,  The Endtimes of Human Rights  (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). For a very effective challenge to such critiques, see Kathryn Sikkink,  Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), and Beth A. Simmons,  Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). See also the pioneering work of Lynn Hunt,  Inventing Human Rights: A History  (New York: Norton, 2007). On the French debates, see Justine Lacroix and Jean-Yves Pranchère,  Le procès des droits de l’homme: Généalogie du scepticisme démocratique  (Paris: Seuil, 2016), which is highly critical of the francophone opponents of human rights. Lacroix and Pranchère’s position is very similar to my own. 

5. See Christian Reus-Smit,  Individual Rights and the Making of the International System  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 210–11, who writes similarly. For two significant works on related themes, though neither addresses directly human rights, see Philipp Ther,  The Dark Side of Nation-States: Ethnic Cleansing in Modern Europe , trans. Charlotte Kreutzmüller (2011; New York: Berghahn, 2014), and Michael Mann,  The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing  (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 

6. See David Weissbrodt,  The Human Rights of Non-Citizens  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 

7. Amid a huge literature on citizenship and rights, I have found especially compelling Ayten Gündoğdu,  Rightlessness in an Age of Rights  (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Margaret R. Somers,  Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Seyla Benhabib,  The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). All three authors work in conversation with Hannah Arendt. On the long and complex history of citizenship, see Frederick Cooper,  Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference: Historical Perspectives  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). Cooper emphasizes the diverse meanings of citizenship, in the present as well as historically. For one of the classic statements, see T. H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class” (1950), in  Class, Citizenship, and Social Development: Essays by T. H. Marshall , introduction by Seymour Martin Lipset (Garden City: Doubleday, 1964), 65–122. 

8. See Steve J. Stern and Scott Straus, “Introduction: Embracing Paradox: Human Rights in the Global Age,” in  The Human Rights Paradox: Universality and its Discontents , ed. Stern and Straus (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 3–28. Also on the complexity of human rights, see Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, “Introduction: Genealogies of Human Rights,” in  Human Rights in the Twentieth Century , ed. Hoffmann (2010; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1–26. 

9. Isaiah Berlin’s famed distinction between negative and positive liberty applies here. See “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958), in  Four Essays on Liberty  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 118–72. 

10. On the varieties of liberal thought, see Helena Rosenblatt,  The Lost History of Liberalism  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). For arguments about the socialist contribution to a broadened conception of human rights, see Lacroix and Pranchère,  Procès des droits de l’homme , and Gregory Claeys, “Socialism and the Language of Human Rights: The Origins and Implications of Economic Rights,” in  Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights , ed. Pamela Slotte and Miia Halme-Tuomisaari (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 206–36. See also Hunt,  Inventing Human Rights . 

11. For the text of the constitution, see “Guatemala’s Constitution of 1985 with Amendments through 1993,” Constitute Project, 17 January 2018, https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Guatemala_1993.pdf.

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• > The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• > Introductory essay: the drafting and significance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Book contents

• Frontmatter
• Table of documents
• Abbreviations and acronyms
• Introductory essay: the drafting and significance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• Table of provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• Subject index

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2013

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948 following a complex drafting process that took nearly two years. Consisting of a preamble and thirty concise articles, totalling less than 1,800 words, the Declaration describes itself as “a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations”. It was designed to be part of a package comprising three components: a declaration or manifesto, a treaty or covenant, and provisions for implementation. The other parts followed the Declaration later, taking nearly two decades for adoption and another ten years for entry into force. The great impact of the Universal Declaration may not have been immediate. Its significance has grown over the years and continues to grow. The Declaration has been invoked in scores of international treaties, in national constitutions and legislation, and in judicial decisions at both the national and the international levels. In 2007, the United Nations Human Rights Council decided that all Member States would present periodic reports on their human rights compliance. Central to the legal framework of this new and novel procedure, known as Universal Periodic Review, are the standards set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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• Edited by William A. Schabas , Middlesex University, London
• Book: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• Online publication: 05 May 2013
• Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139600491.004

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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Modern History of Human Rights

54 Pages Posted: 9 Nov 2017

Fengyu Duan

Independent

Date Written: November 7, 2017

Beginning with the phrase “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) proclaims its purpose of establishing global human rights from the outset. As a common standard of achievement for all signatory nations, the UDHR constitutes an essential cornerstone in the modern history of human rights by drawing upon ancient to contemporary philosophies, responses to the heinous crimes of World War II, and various visions for future human rights standards. Despite diverging viewpoints from many of the drafting parties and states, the UDHR eventually transcended conflict to form the underpinnings of a moral compass for all of humankind. This essay first explores how the UDHR came into formation by reviewing the historical origins of human rights, global dynamics prior to the UDHR, the drafting process and key debates involved, and finally its achieved compromise and ultimate unanimous adoption. Then, the essay examines ways in which the UDHR has evolved, from both a legal and moral angle, since its adoption in the context of past achievements and current challenges. From a historical point of view, I argue that the UDHR is a living document that has and is expected to change as our societies continue to evolve.

Keywords: human rights, human rights project, international human rights, UDHR, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, human rights standards, Human Rights Commission, global human rights, future human rights, United Nations, United States Declaration of Independence, political rights, economic rights, social

JEL Classification: K38, K33, Z13, Z18, N40, K19

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Fengyu Duan (Contact Author)

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Human Rights

Human rights are norms that aspire to protect all people everywhere from severe political, legal, and social abuses. Examples of human rights are the right to freedom of religion, the right to a fair trial when charged with a crime, the right not to be tortured, and the right to education. The philosophy of human rights addresses questions about the existence, content, nature, universality, justification, and legal status of human rights. The strong claims often made on behalf of human rights (for example, that they are universal, inalienable, or exist independently of legal enactment as justified moral norms) have frequently provoked skeptical doubts and countering philosophical defenses (on these doubts see Lacroix & Pranchère 2016; Mutua 2002; and Waldron 1987). Reflection on these doubts and the responses that can be made to them has become a sub-field of political and legal philosophy with a very substantial literature (see the extensive Bibliography below). This entry addresses the concept of human rights, the existence and grounds of human rights, the question of which rights are human rights, and relativism about human rights.

1. The General Idea of Human Rights

2.1 how can human rights exist, 2.2 justifications for human rights, 3.1 civil and political rights, 3.2 economic and social rights, 3.3 human rights of women, minorities, and groups, 3.4 new human rights, 4. universal human rights in a world of diverse beliefs and practices, a. books and articles in the philosophy of human rights, b. legal declarations, other internet resources, related entries.

This section attempts to explain the general idea of human rights by identifying four defining features. The goal is to answer the question of what human rights are with a description of the concept rather than with a list of specific rights. Two people can have the same general idea of human rights even though they disagree about which rights are really human rights and even about whether universal human rights are a good idea. The four-part explanation just below attempts to cover all kinds of human rights including both moral and legal human rights as well as old and new human rights (e.g., both Lockean natural rights and contemporary human rights). The explanation anticipates, however, that particular kinds of human rights will have additional features. Starting with this general concept does not commit us to treating all kinds of human rights in a single unified theory (see Buchanan 2013 for an argument that we should not attempt to theorize together universal moral rights and international legal human rights).

Human rights are rights . Lest we miss the obvious, human rights are rights (see Cruft 2012 and the entry on rights ). Rights focus on a freedom, protection, status, immunity, or benefit for the rightholders. Most human rights are claim rights that impose duties or responsibilities on their addressees or dutybearers. The duties associated with human rights often require actions involving respect, protection, facilitation, and provision. Although human rights are usually mandatory in the sense of imposing duties on specified parties, some legal human rights seem to do little more than declare high-priority goals and assign responsibility for their progressive realization. One can argue, of course, that goalish rights are not real rights, but it may be better to recognize that they comprise a weak but useful notion of a right. (See Beitz 2009 for a defense of the view that not all human rights are rights in a strong sense. Also, see Feinberg 1973 for the idea of “manifesto rights” and Nickel 2013 for a discussion of “rightslike goals”.)

Human rights are plural and come in lists . If someone accepted that there are human rights but held that there is only one of them, this might make sense if she meant that there is one abstract underlying right that generates a list of specific rights (see Dworkin 2011 for a view of this sort). But if this person meant that there is just one specific right such as the right to peaceful assembly this would be a highly revisionary view. Some philosophers advocate very short lists of human rights but nevertheless accept plurality (see Ignatieff 2004).

Human rights are universal . All living humans—or perhaps we should say all living persons —have human rights. One does not have to be a particular kind of person or a member of some specific nation or religion to have human rights. Included in the idea of universality is some conception of independent existence. People have human rights independently of whether such rights are present in the practices, morality, or law of their country or culture. This idea of universality needs several qualifications, however. First, some rights, such as the right to vote, are held only by adult citizens or residents and apply only to voting in one’s own country. Second, some rights can be suspended. For example, the human right to freedom of movement may be suspended temporarily during a riot or a wildfire. And third, some human rights treaties focus not on the rights of everyone but rather on the rights of specific groups such as minorities, women, indigenous peoples, and children.

Human rights have high-priority . Maurice Cranston held that human rights are matters of “paramount importance” and their violation “a grave affront to justice” (Cranston 1967: 51, 52). If human rights were not very important norms they would not have the ability to compete with other powerful considerations such as national stability and security, individual and national self-determination, and national and global prosperity. High priority does not mean, however, that human rights are absolute. As James Griffin says, human rights should be understood as “resistant to trade-offs, but not too resistant” (Griffin 2008: 77). Further, there seems to be priority variation among human rights. For example, the right to life is generally thought to have greater importance than the right to privacy; when the two conflict the right to privacy will generally be outweighed.

Let’s now consider four other features or functions that might be added to these four.

Should human rights be defined as inalienable? Inalienability does not mean that rights are absolute or can never be overridden by other considerations. Rather it means that its holder cannot lose it temporarily or permanently by bad conduct or by voluntarily giving it up. It is doubtful that all human rights are inalienable in this sense. One who endorses both human rights and imprisonment as punishment for serious crimes must hold that people’s rights to freedom of movement can be forfeited temporarily or permanently by just convictions of serious crimes. Perhaps it is sufficient to say that human rights are very hard to lose. (For a stronger view of inalienability, see Donnelly 1989 [2020] and Meyers 1985.)

Should human rights be defined as minimal rights? A number of philosophers have proposed the view that human rights are minimal in the sense of not being too numerous (a few dozen rights rather than hundreds or thousands), and not too demanding (see Joshua Cohen 2004 and Ignatieff 2004). Their views suggest that human rights are—or should be—more concerned with avoiding the worst than with achieving the best. Henry Shue suggests that human rights concern the “lower limits on tolerable human conduct” rather than “great aspirations and exalted ideals” (Shue 1996: ix). When human rights are modest standards they leave most legal and policy matters open to democratic decision-making at the national and local levels. This allows human rights to have high priority, to accommodate a great deal of cultural and institutional variation among countries, and to leave open a large space for democratic decision-making at the national level. Still, there is no contradiction in the idea of an extremely expansive list of human rights and hence minimalism is not a defining feature of human rights (for criticism of the view that human rights are minimal standards see Brems 2009; Etinson forthcoming; and Raz 2010). Minimalism is best seen as a normative prescription for what international human rights should be. Moderate forms of minimalism have considerable appeal as recommendations, but not as part of the definition of human rights.

Should human rights be defined as always being or “mirroring” moral rights? Philosophers coming to human rights theory from moral philosophy sometimes assume that human rights must be, at bottom, moral rather than legal rights. There is no contradiction, however, in people saying that they believe in human rights, but only when they are legal rights at the national or international levels. As Louis Henkin observed,

Political forces have mooted the principal philosophical objections, bridging the chasm between natural and positive law by converting natural human rights into positive legal rights. (Henkin 1978: 19)

It has also been suggested that legal human rights can be justified without directly appealing to any corresponding moral human right (see Buchanan 2013).

Should human rights be defined in terms of serving some sort of political function? Instead of seeing human rights as grounded in some sort of independently existing moral reality, a theorist might see them as the norms of a highly useful political practice that humans have constructed. Such a view would see the idea of human rights as playing various political roles at the national and international levels and as serving thereby to protect urgent human and national interests. These political roles might include providing standards for international evaluations of how governments treat their people and specifying when use of economic sanctions or military intervention is permissible. This kind of view may be plausible for the very salient international human rights that have emerged in international law and politics in the last fifty years. But human rights can exist and function in contexts not involving international scrutiny and intervention such as a world with only one state. Imagine, for example, that a massive asteroid strike makes New Zealand the only remaining state in existence. Surely the idea of human rights along with many dimensions of human rights practice could continue in New Zealand, even though there would be no international relations, law, or politics (for an argument of this sort see Tasioulas 2012a). And if in the same scenario a few people were discovered to have survived in Iceland and were living without a government or state, New Zealanders would know that human rights governed how these people should be treated even though they were stateless. How deeply the idea of human rights must be rooted in international law and practice should not be settled by definitional fiat. We can allow, however, that the sorts of political functions that Rawls and Beitz describe are typically served by international human rights today.

2 The Existence and Grounds of Human Rights

The most obvious way in which human rights exist is as norms of national and international law. At the international level, human rights norms exist because of treaties that have turned them into international law. For example, the human right not to be held in slavery or servitude in Article 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights and in Article 8 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights exists because these treaties establish it. At the national level, human rights norms exist because they have—through legislative enactment, judicial decision, or custom—become part of a country’s law. For example, the right against slavery exists in the United States because the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits slavery and servitude. When rights are embedded in international law, we are apt to speak of them as human rights; but when they are enacted in national law we more frequently describe them as civil or constitutional rights.

Although enactment in national and international law is one of the ways in which human rights exist, many have suggested that this is not the only way. If human rights exist only because of enactment, their availability is contingent on domestic and international political developments. Many people have looked for a way to support the idea that human rights have roots that are deeper and less subject to human decisions than legal enactment. One version of this idea is that people are born with rights, that human rights are somehow innate or inherent in human beings (see Morsink 2009). One way that a normative status could be inherent in humans is by being god-given. The American Declaration of Independence claims that people are “endowed by their Creator” with natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. On this view, god, the supreme lawmaker, enacted some basic human rights.

Rights plausibly attributed to divine decree must be very general and abstract (life, liberty, etc.) so that they can apply across thousands of years of human history, not just to recent centuries. But contemporary human rights are specific and many of them presuppose contemporary institutions (e.g., the right to a fair trial, the right to social security, and the right to education). Even if people are born with god-given natural rights, we need to explain how to get from those general and abstract rights to the specific rights found in contemporary declarations and treaties.

Attributing human rights to god’s commands may give them a secure status at the metaphysical level, but in a very diverse world it does not make them practically secure. Billions of people today do not believe in the god of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. If people do not believe in god, or in the sort of god that prescribes rights, then if you want to base human rights on theological beliefs you must persuade these people to accept a rights-supporting theological view. This is likely to be even harder than persuading them of human rights. Legal enactment at the national and international levels provides a far more secure status for practical purposes.

Human rights could also exist independently of legal enactment by being part of actual human moralities. All human groups seem to have moralities, that is, imperative norms of behavior backed by reasons and values. These moralities contain specific norms (for example, a prohibition on the intentional murder of innocent persons) and specific values (for example, valuing human life). One way in which human rights could exist apart from divine or human enactment is as norms accepted in almost all actual human moralities. If almost all human groups have moralities containing norms that prohibit murder, for example, these norms could constitute the human right to life.

This view is attractive but has serious difficulties. Although worldwide acceptance of human rights has increased in recent decades (see below section 4. Universal Human Rights in a World of Diverse Beliefs and Practices ), worldwide moral unanimity about human rights does not exist. Human rights declarations and treaties are intended to change existing norms, not just describe an existing moral consensus.

Yet another way of explaining the existence of human rights is to say that they exist most basically in true or justified ethical outlooks. On this account, to say that there is a human right against torture is mainly to assert that there are strong reasons for believing that it is always morally wrong to engage in torture and that protections should be provided against its practice. This approach would view the Universal Declaration as attempting to formulate a justified political morality: that is, as not merely trying to identify a preexisting moral consensus, but trying to create a consensus that could be supported by very plausible moral and practical reasons. This approach requires commitment to the objectivity of such reasons. It holds that just as there are reliable ways of finding out how the physical world works, or what makes buildings sturdy and durable, there are reliable ways of finding out what individuals may justifiably demand of each other and of governments. Even if unanimity about human rights is currently lacking, rational agreement is available to humans if they will commit themselves to open-minded and serious moral and political inquiry. If moral reasons exist independently of human construction, they can—when combined with premises about current institutions, problems, and resources—generate moral norms different from those currently accepted or enacted. The Universal Declaration seems to proceed on exactly this assumption (see Morsink 2009).

One problem with this view is that an existence based on good reasons seems a rather thin form of existence for human rights. But perhaps we can view this thinness as a practical rather than a theoretical problem—that is, as something to be remedied by the formulation and enactment of legal norms. The best form of existence for human rights would combine robust legal existence with the sort of moral existence that comes from being supported by strong moral and practical reasons.

Justifications for human rights should identify plausible starting points for defending the key features of human rights and offer an account of the transition from those starting points to a list of specific rights (see Nickel 2007). Further, justifying international human rights is likely to require additional steps (see Buchanan 2013). These requirements make the construction of a good justification a daunting task.

Recent attempts to justify human rights offer a dizzying variety of grounds. These include prudential reasons; linkage arguments (Shue 1996); agency and autonomy (Gewirth 1996; Griffin 2008); basic needs (D. Miller 2012); capabilities and positive freedom (Gould 2004; Nussbaum 2000; and Sen 2004) dignity (Gilabert 2018b; Kateb 2011, Tasioulas 2015); and fairness, status equality, and equal respect (Dworkin 2011; Buchanan 2013).

There is a lot of overlap between these approaches, but also important differences that are likely to make them yield different results. For example, an approach framed in terms of agency and autonomy will be more strongly and directly supportive of fundamental freedoms than one framed in terms of basic human needs. Justifications can be based on just one of these types of reasons or be pluralistic and appeal to several. Seeing so much diversity in philosophical approaches to justification may be discouraging (although great disagreement in approaches is common in philosophy) but its good side is that it suggests that there are at least several plausible ways of justifying human rights.

Philosophical justifications for human rights differ in how much credibility they attribute to contemporary lists of human rights, such as the one found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Some take fidelity to contemporary human rights practice as nearly imperative while others prioritize particular normative frameworks even if they can only justify some of the rights in contemporary lists.

Attempting to discuss all of these approaches would be a task for a large book, not an encyclopedic entry. The discussion here is limited to two approaches: agency/autonomy and dignity.

2.2.1 Agency and Autonomy

Grounding human rights in human agency and autonomy has had strong advocates in recent decades (Griffin 2008; Gould 2004). An important forerunner in this area was Alan Gewirth. In Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Application (1982), Gewirth argued that human rights are indispensable conditions of a life as an agent who survives and acts. Abstractly described, the conditions of such a life are basic freedom and well-being. A prudent rational agent who must have freedom and well-being will assert a “prudential right claim” (1982: 31)to them. But, having demanded that others must respect her freedom and well-being, consistency requires her to recognize and respect the freedom and well-being of all other persons, too. She “logically must accept” (1982: 20) that other people as agents have equal rights to freedom and well-being. These two abstract rights work alone and together to generate a list of more determinate human rights of familiar sorts (Gewirth 1978, 1982, 1996). Gewirth’s argument generated a large critical literature (see Beyleveld 1991 and Boylan 1999).

A more recent attempt to base human rights on agency and autonomy is found in James Griffin’s book, On Human Rights (2008). Griffin does not share Gewirth’s goal of providing a logically inescapable argument for human rights, but his overall view shares key structural features with Gewirth’s. These include basing the justification on the unique value of agency and autonomy, postulating some abstract rights, and making place for a right to well-being within an agency-based approach.

In the current dispute between “moral” (or “orthodox”) and “political” conceptions of human rights, Griffin strongly sides with those who see human rights as fundamentally moral rights (on this debate see Liao & Etinson 2012). Their defining role, in Griffin’s view, is protecting people’s ability to form and pursue conceptions of a worthwhile life—a capacity that Griffin variously refers to as “autonomy”, “normative agency”, and “personhood”. This ability to form, revise, and pursue conceptions of a worthwhile life is taken to be of paramount value, the exclusive source of human dignity, and thereby the basis of human rights. Griffin holds that people value this capacity “especially highly, often more highly than even our happiness” (2008: 32 [§2.3])

“Practicalities” also shape human rights in Griffin’s view. He describes practicalities as “a second ground” (2008: 37–39 [§2.5]) of human rights. They prescribe making the boundaries of rights clear by avoiding “too many complicated bends” (2008: 37 [§2.5]), enlarging rights a little to give them safety margins, and consulting facts about human nature and the nature of society. Accordingly, the justifying generic function that Griffin assigns to human rights is protecting normative agency while taking account of practicalities.

Griffin thinks that he can explain the universality of human rights by recognizing that normative agency is a threshold concept—once one is above the threshold one has the same rights as everyone else. One’s degree of agency above the threshold does not matter. There are no “degrees of being a person” (2008: 67 [§3.5]) among competent adults. Treating agency in this way, however, is a normative policy, not just a fact about concepts. An alternative policy is possible, namely proportioning people’s rights to their level of normative agency. This is what we do with children; their rights grow as they develop greater agency and responsibility. To exclude proportional rights, and to explain the egalitarian dimensions of human rights, including their character as universal and equal rights to be enjoyed without discrimination, some additional ground pertaining to fairness and equality seems to be needed.

This last point raises the question of whether agency-based approaches in general can adequately account for the universality, equality, and anti-discriminatory character of human rights. The idea that human rights are to be respected and protected without discrimination seems to be most centrally a matter of fairness rather than one of agency, freedom, or welfare. Discrimination often harms and hinders its victims, but even when it doesn’t it is still deeply unfair. For example, human rights that explicitly refer to fair wages and equal pay for equal work (ICESCR Articles 3 and 7.i) seem to be much more about fairness than about agency, freedom, or welfare—particularly since human rights to a wage that ensures a decent standard of living are often mentioned separately (ICESCR Article 7.ii).

2.2.2 Dignity

Many human rights declarations and treaties invoke human dignity as the ground of human rights. In recent decades numerous books and articles have been published that advocate dignitarian approaches to justifying human rights (for example, Gilabert 2018b; Kateb 2014; McCrudden 2013 and the many essays therein; Tasioulas 2015; Waldron 2012 and 2015). There have also been many critics, including Den Hartogh 2014; Etinson 2020; Green 2010; Macklin 2003; Rosen 2012; and Sangiovanni 2017.

A well-worked out conception of human dignity is likely to have at least three parts. The first describes the nature of human dignity, specifying for example whether it is a kind of value, status, or virtue (see Rosen 2012). The second explains the grounds of human dignity—that is, why, or in virtue of which shared capacities or features we all have the sort of dignity described in the first step. Finally, and third, there is the question of human dignity’s practical requirements, or what is concretely involved in “respecting” it. (See the entry on dignity for a broader discussion.)

Human dignity is often understood as a special worth or status which all human beings share in contrast to other animals (e.g., Kateb 2011). We can call this the “Special Worth Thesis”. Attempts to provide good explanatory grounds for the Special Worth Thesis identify one or more valuable features that all human persons share and that non-human animals mostly do not possess or have at much lower levels. The valuable features identified will presumably once again need to be “threshold concepts”, so that people can vary in how much of the feature or capacity they have without thereby losing, lessening, or increasing their human dignity in comparison to other persons. Human dignity is, after all, supposed to be a strongly egalitarian idea. Plausible candidates for such grounds might include moral abilities (to understand and follow moral values and norms and to reason and act in terms of them); thought, imagination, and rationality; self-consciousness and reflective capacities; and the use of complicated language and technologies, among others.

One worry about the Special Worth Thesis is its self-glorifying character. In claiming special worth we humans seem to excuse our many faults—including a terrible capacity for evil, routinely evidenced in our behavior towards other humans and towards non-human animals (Rosen 2013). Another closely associated and increasingly prominent worry is that the Special Worth Thesis is speciesist, arbitrarily ranking the interests, status, and/or value of human beings above that/those of non-human animals (Kymlicka 2018; Meyer 2001). In the context of these reasonable concerns, it is worth noting that support for, or a belief in, human dignity need not be prejudicial towards non-human animals; one can affirm the dignity of homo sapiens while also affirming the equal dignity of other species and forms of life (Etinson 2020; Gilabert 2018b). The Special Worth Thesis is optional and only defended by some theorists.

What attitudes, actions, policies, and rights follow from the duty or reason to respect human dignity? And are human rights among them? The answer will at least in part depend on what we think human dignity is. If it is a kind of virtue shared or shareable by all persons then its practical requirements will include things like praising and/or admiring those who possess it, and perhaps developing or cultivating “dignitarian” dispositions in one’s own character. If human dignity is, by contrast, a kind of value or worth (as in Immanuel Kant’s famous understanding of dignity as a worth “beyond all price” Kant 1785/1996: 43), then it is something we have reason to protect, promote, preserve, cherish, restore and perhaps even maximize, if possible. The human right to life, and its material conditions, is an intuitive product of human dignity understood in this way. If, on the other hand, we think of human dignity as a kind of legal (Waldron 2012 and 2015), moral (Gilabert 2018b; Lee & George 2008), or social status (Etinson 2020; Killmister 2020), then duties of “respect” more naturally follow.

These options are not mutually exclusive. In principle, human dignity can refer to all of these things: value, status, and virtue. If human dignity yields human rights, however, this is going to depend on exactly how we understand its practical requirements in light of its nature and grounds. This practical elaboration is the workhorse of a conception of human dignity. It normally results in one or more general maxims or guidelines: e.g., not to humiliate or degrade, never to treat persons merely as a means, to treat others in justifiable ways, to avoid severe cruelty, to respect autonomy, etc. The prospect of grounding human rights in human dignity faces critical challenges at this juncture. As we saw in the preceding discussion of agency-based approaches, the more specific and singular one’s dignitarian maxim is, the less plausible it will be as an exhaustive ground for standard lists of human rights in all their variety. On the other hand, a pluralistic set of grounding maxims will make human dignity a better source of human rights, but it is unclear whether in doing so we are simply explaining its implicit content or bringing in other values and norms to fill in its indeterminate scope. This raises the possibility that values and norms such as promoting human welfare; agency/autonomy; and fairness partially constitute the idea of human dignity rather than being derived from it (see Macklin 2003).

3. Which Rights are Human Rights?

This section discusses the question of which rights belong on lists of human rights. The Universal Declaration’s list, which has been very influential, consists of six families:

• Security rights that protect people against murder, torture, and genocide;
• Due process rights that protect people against arbitrary and excessively harsh punishments and require fair and public trials for those accused of crimes;
• Liberty rights that protect people’s fundamental freedoms in areas such as belief, expression, association, and movement;
• Political rights that protect people’s liberty to participate in politics by assembling, protesting, voting, and serving in public office;
• Equality rights that guarantee equal citizenship, equality before the law, and freedom from discrimination; and
• Economic and social rights that require that governments to forbid slavery and forced labor, enforce safe working conditions, ensure to all the availability of work, education, health services, and a standard of living that is adequate.

A seventh category, minority and group rights, has been created by subsequent treaties. These rights protect women, racial and ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples, children, migrant workers, and the disabled. This list of human rights seems normatively diverse: the issues addressed cover include security, liberty, fairness, equality before the law, access to work and good working conditions, unduly cruel treatment, and political participation.

In spite of the ample list above, not every question of social justice or wise governance is a human rights issue. For example, a country could have too many lawyers or inadequate provision for graduate-level education without violating any human rights. Deciding which norms should be counted as human rights is a matter of considerable difficulty. And there is continuing pressure to expand lists of human rights to include new areas. Many political movements would like to see their main concerns categorized as matters of human rights, since this would publicize, promote, and legitimize their concerns at the international level. A possible result of this is “human rights inflation”, the devaluation of human rights caused by producing too much bad human rights currency (see Cranston 1973; Orend 2002; Wellman 1995; Griffin 2008).

One way to avoid rights inflation is to follow Cranston in insisting that human rights only deal with extremely important goods, protections, and freedoms. A supplementary approach is to impose several justificatory tests for specific human rights. For example, it could be required that a proposed human right not only protect some very important good but also respond to one or more common and serious threats to that good (Dershowitz 2004; Donnelly 1989 [2003]; Shue 1996; Talbott 2005), impose burdens on the addressees that are justifiable and no larger than necessary, and be feasible in most of the world’s countries (on feasibility see Gheaus 2022; Gilabert 2009; Nickel 2007; and Richards 2023). This approach restrains rights inflation with several tests, not just one master test.

In deciding which norms should be considered human rights it is possible to make either too little or too much of international documents such as the Universal Declaration and the European Convention. One makes too little of them by proceeding as if drawing up a list of important rights were a new question, never before addressed, and as if there were no practical wisdom to be found in the choices of rights that went into the historic documents. And one makes too much of them by presuming that those documents tell us everything we need to know about human rights. This approach involves a kind of fundamentalism: it holds that when a right is on the official lists of human rights that settles its status as a human right (“If it’s in the book that’s all I need to know”.) But the process of identifying human rights in the United Nations and elsewhere was a political process with plenty of imperfections. There is little reason to take international diplomats as the most authoritative guides to which human rights there are. Further, even if a treaty’s ratification by most countries can settle the question of whether a certain right is a human right within international law, such a treaty cannot settle its weight. The treaty may suggest that the right is supported by weighty considerations, but it cannot make this so. If an international treaty enacted a right to visit national parks without charge as a human right, the ratification of that treaty would make free access to national parks a human right within international law, but it may well fail to persuade us that national park access is important enough to be a genuine human right.

The least controversial family of human rights is civil and political rights. These rights are familiar from historic bills of rights such as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789) and the U.S. Bill of Rights (1791, with subsequent amendments). Contemporary sources include the first 21 Articles of the Universal Declaration , and treaties such as the European Convention , the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights , the American Convention on Human Rights , and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights . Some representative formulations follow:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought and expression. This right includes freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing, in print, in the form of art, or through any other medium of one’s choice. ( American Convention on Human Rights , Article 13.1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and to freedom of association with others, including the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests. ( European Convention , Article 11) No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. (ICCPR Article 17)

Most civil and political rights are not absolute—they can sometimes be overridden by other considerations. For example, the right to freedom of movement can be restricted by public and private property rights, by restraining orders related to domestic violence, and by legal punishments. Further, after a disaster such as a hurricane or earthquake free movement is often appropriately suspended to keep out the curious, permit access of emergency vehicles and equipment, and prevent looting. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights permits most rights to be suspended during times “of public emergency which threatens the life of the nation” (ICCPR Article 4). But it excludes some rights from suspension including the right to life, the prohibition of torture, the prohibition of slavery, the prohibition of ex post facto criminal laws, and freedom of thought and religion.

The Universal Declaration included economic and social rights (“ESRs”) that address matters such as education, food, health services, and employment. Their inclusion has been the source of much controversy (see Beetham 1995). The European Convention did not include them (although it was later amended to include the right to education). Instead ESRs were put into a separate treaty, the European Social Charter . When the United Nations began the process of putting the rights of the Universal Declaration into international law, it followed the same pattern by placing ESRs in a treaty separate from the one dealing with civil and political rights. This treaty, the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR, 1966), treated these standards as rights—albeit rights to be progressively realized.

The ICESCR includes rights to: freedom from slavery and forced labor; adequate income or services to cover food, water, clothing, and shelter; basic health conditions and services; free public education; freedom to work, choose one's occupation, and have adequate opportunities for remunerative employment; fair pay and safe conditions of work; social security; equality for women in the workplace, including equal pay for equal work; freedom to form trade unions and to strike; special protections for mothers and children; adequate rest and leisure; and nondiscrimination in respecting, protecting, and fulfilling these rights. In terms of underlying values and norms, some of these rights are welfare-oriented, others are fairness-oriented, and still others are freedom-oriented (Nickel 2022b).

Article 2.1 of the ICESCR sets out what each of the parties commits itself to do about this list, namely to

take steps, individually and through international assistance and co-operation…to the maximum of its available resources, with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of the rights recognized in the present Covenant.

In contrast, the Civil and Political Covenant commits its signatories to immediate compliance, to

respect and to ensure to all individuals within its territory the rights recognized in the present Covenant. (ICCPR Article 2.1)

The contrast between these two levels of commitment has led some people to suspect that ESRs are really just valuable goals. For many countries, noncompliance due to inability would have been certain if these standards had been treated as immediately binding.

ESRs have often been defended with linkage arguments which claim that ESRs provide indispensable support to the realization of civil and political rights. This approach was first developed philosophically by Henry Shue. He argued that security and subsistence are so indispensable to the full realization of other rights that anyone who endorses the realization of any other right must also endorse ESRs (Shue 1980; for analysis and critical assessments of linkage arguments see Nickel 2007, 2016, and 2022a).

Do ESRs protect sufficiently important human interests? Maurice Cranston opposed ESRs by suggesting that they are mainly concerned with matters such as holidays with pay which are not of deep and universal human interest (Cranston 1967, 1973; treatments of objections to ESRs include Beetham 1995; Howard 1983; and Nickel 2007). It is far from the case, however, that most ESRs pertain only to superficial interests. Consider two examples: the right to an adequate standard of living and the right to free public education. The former requires governments to work hard at remedying widespread and serious evils such as severe poverty, starvation and malnutrition, and ignorance. The importance of food and other basic material conditions of life is easy to show. These goods are essential to people’s ability to live, function, and flourish. Without adequate access to these goods, interests in life, health, and liberty are endangered and serious illness and death are probable. The unavailability of educational opportunities typically limits (both absolutely and comparatively) people’s abilities to participate fully and effectively in the political and economic life of their county

Are ESRs too burdensome? Another objection to ESRs is that they are too burdensome on their dutybearers. It is very expensive to guarantee everyone basic education and minimal material conditions. Frequently the claim that ESRs are too burdensome suggests that ESRs are substantially more burdensome or expensive than liberty rights. Suppose, however, that we use as a basis of comparison liberty rights such as freedom of communication, association, and movement. These rights require both respect and protection from governments. And people cannot be adequately protected in their enjoyment of liberties such as these unless they also have security and due process rights. The costs of liberty, as it were, include the costs of law and criminal justice. Once we see this, liberty rights start to look a lot more costly.

Further, we need not generally think of ESRs as simply giving everyone a free supply of the goods they protect. Guarantees of things like food and housing may be intolerably expensive and undermine productivity if everyone simply receives a free supply. A viable system of ESRs can require most people to provide these goods for themselves and their families through work, as long as they are given the necessary opportunities, education, and infrastructure. Government-implemented ESRs provide guarantees of availability (or “secure access”), but under many conditions governments should only have to supply the requisite goods in a small fraction of cases.

Countries that do not accept and implement ESRs must still somehow bear the costs of providing for the needy since these countries are unlikely to find it tolerable to allow sizable parts of the population to starve and be homeless. If government does not supply food, clothing, and shelter to those unable to provide for themselves, then families, friends, and communities will have to shoulder this burden. It is only in the last hundred or so years that government-sponsored ESRs have taken over a substantial part of the burden of providing for the needy. The taxes associated with ESRs are partial replacements for other burdensome duties, namely the duties of families and communities to provide adequate care for the unemployed, sick, disabled, and aged. Deciding whether to implement ESRs is not a matter of deciding whether to bear such burdens, but rather of deciding whether to continue with total reliance on systems of informal provision that distribute assistance in a very spotty way and whose costs fall very unevenly on families, friends, and communities.

Are ESRs feasible worldwide? Another objection to ESRs alleges that they are not feasible in many countries (on feasibility see Gheaus 2013, Gilabert 2009, and Nickel 2007). It is very expensive to provide guarantees of subsistence, measures to protect and restore people’s health, and education. Many governments will be unable to provide these guarantees while meeting other important responsibilities. Rights are not magical sources of supply (Holmes & Sunstein 1999). As we saw earlier, the ESR Covenant dealt with the issue of feasibility by calling for progressive implementation, that is, implementation as financial and other resources permit. Does this view of implementation turn ESRs into high-priority goals? And if so, is that a bad thing?

Standards that outrun the abilities of many of their addressees are good candidates for treatment as goals. Viewing them as largely aspirational rather than as imposing immediate duties avoids problems of inability-based noncompliance. One may worry, however, that this is too much of a demotion for ESRs because goals seem much weaker than rights (see O’Neill 2005 and Tomalty 2014). But goals can be formulated in ways that make them more like rights. They can be assigned addressees (the parties who are to pursue the goal), beneficiaries, scopes that define the objective to be pursued, and a high level of priority (see Langford, Sumner, & Yamin 2013 and Nickel 2013; see also OHCHR and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, UN ). Strong reasons for the importance of these goals can be provided. And supervisory bodies can monitor levels of progress and pressure low-performing addressees to attend to and work on realizing their goals.

Treating very demanding rights as goals has some advantages. Goals coexist easily with low levels of ability to achieve them. And goals are flexible: addressees with different levels of ability can choose ways of pursuing the goals that suit their circumstances and means. Because of these attractions it may be worth exploring sophisticated ways to transform very demanding human rights into goals. The transformation may be full or partial. It is possible to create right-goal mixtures that contain some mandatory elements (see Brems 2009). A right-goal mixture might include some rights-like goals, some mandatory steps to be taken immediately, and duties to realize the rights-like goals as quickly as possible.

Do ESRs yield a sufficient commitment to equality? Objections to ESRs as human rights have come from both the political right and the political left. A common objection from the left, including liberal egalitarians and socialists, is that ESRs as enumerated in human rights documents and treaties provide too weak of a commitment to material equality (Gilabert 2018a and Moyn 2018). Realizing ESRs requires governments to ensure everyone an adequate minimum of resources in some key areas but does not require strong commitments to equality of opportunity, redistributive taxation, or wealth ceilings (see the entries on equality , distributive justice , and liberal feminism ).

The egalitarian objection cannot be that human rights documents and treaties show no concern for people living in poverty and misery. One of the main purposes of including ESRs in human rights documents and treaties was to promote serious efforts to combat poverty, lack of education, and unhealthy living conditions in countries all around the world (see also Langford, Sumner, & Yamin 2013 on the UN Millennium Development Goals). The objection also cannot be that human rights facilitated the hollowing out of systems of welfare rights in many developed countries that occurred after 1980 (for criticism of this view see Song 2019). Those cuts in welfare programs were often in violation of the requirements of realizing ESRs.

Perhaps it should be conceded that human rights documents and treaties have not said enough about positive measures to promote equal opportunity in education and work. A positive right to equal opportunity, like the one Rawls proposed, would require countries to take serious measures to reduce disparities between the opportunities effectively available to children of high-income and low-income parents (see Rawls 1971 and the entry on equality of opportunity ).

A strongly egalitarian political program is probably best pursued partially within but mostly beyond the human rights framework. One reason for this is that the human rights movement will have better prospects for ongoing acceptance and support if it has widespread political acceptance. To achieve this, the rights it endorses must appeal to people with a variety of political views, ranging from center-left to center-right. Support from the broad political center is less likely to emerge and survive if the human rights platform is perceived as mostly a leftist program.

Equality of rights for historically disadvantaged or subordinated groups is a longstanding concern of the human rights movement. Human rights documents repeatedly emphasize that all people, including women and members of minority ethnic and religious groups, have equal human rights and should be able to enjoy them without discrimination. The right to freedom from discrimination figures prominently in the Universal Declaration and subsequent treaties. The Civil and Political Covenant, for example, commits participating states to respect and protect their people’s rights without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, or social status (ICCPR Article 2.1). On minority and group rights see Kymlicka 1995.

A number of standard civil and political rights are especially important to ethnic and religious minorities, including rights to freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and freedom from discrimination. Human rights documents also include rights that refer to minorities explicitly and give them special protections. For example, the Civil and Political Covenant in Article 27 says that persons belonging to ethnic, religious, or linguistic minorities

shall not be denied the right, in community with other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language. (ICCPR Article 27)

Feminists have often protested that standard lists of human rights do not sufficiently take into account the unique risks faced by women. For example, issues like domestic violence, reproductive choice, and the trafficking of women and girls for sex work did not have a prominent place in early human rights documents and treaties. Lists of human rights have had to be expanded “to include the degradation and violation of women” (Bunch 2006; see also Okin 1998). Violations of women’s human rights often occur in the “private” sphere, i.e., in the home at the hands of other family members. This suggests that governments cannot be seen as the only addressees of human rights and that the right to privacy of home and family needs qualification to allow police to protect women within the home.

The issue of how formulations of human rights should respond to variations in the sorts of risks and dangers that different people face is difficult and arises not just in relation to gender but also in relation to age, race, sexual orientation, profession, political affiliation, religion, and personal interests. Due process rights, for example, are much more useful to young people (and particularly young men) than they are to older people since the latter are far less likely to run afoul of the criminal law.

Since 1964 the United Nations has mainly dealt with the rights of women and minorities through specialized treaties such as the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965); the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979); the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2007). See also the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007). Specialized treaties allow international norms to address unique problems of particular groups such as assistance and care during pregnancy and childbearing in the case of women, custody issues in the case of children, and the loss of historic territories by indigenous peoples.

Minority groups are often targets of violence. Human rights norms call upon governments to refrain from such violence and to provide protections against it. This work is partly done by the right to life, which is a standard individual right. It is also done by the right against genocide which protects groups from attempts to destroy or decimate them. The Genocide Convention was one of the first human rights treaties after World War II. The right against genocide is clearly a group right. It is held by both individuals and groups and provides protection to groups as groups. It is largely negative in the sense that it requires governments and other agencies to refrain from destroying groups; but it also requires that legal and other protections against genocide be created at the national level.

As a group right, can the right against genocide be a human right? More generally, can a group right fit the general idea of human rights as rights of individual persons proposed earlier? Perhaps it can if we broaden our conception of who can hold human rights to include important groups that people form and cherish (see the entry on group rights ). This can be made more palatable, perhaps, by recognizing that the beneficiaries of the right against genocide are individual humans who enjoy greater security against attempts to destroy the group to which they belong (Kymlicka 1989).

Although contemporary lists of human rights are already long, there are doubtless norms that should be counted as human rights but are not generally recognized as such. After all, there are lots of areas in which people’s basic welfare, dignity, and fundamental interests are threatened by the actions and omissions of individuals and governments. New technologies create new problems and require us to rethink old solutions. And new political movements emerge and create demands for their goals and norms as human rights.

Prominent recent proposals of new human rights include Kimberley Brownlee’s advocacy of a right against social deprivation that would address severe unwanted loneliness (Brownlee 2020 and 2022), the proposal of a universal right to internet access that was endorsed by the UN General Assembly in 2016 (UN Resolution 32/13), and the similar endorsement in 2022 of a right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment (UN Resolution 76/300; see also the entry on environmental ethics ).

The right to a healthy environment provides a good example of how new human rights can slowly emerge. After a right of this sort was added to many national bills of rights, environmental NGOs began to promote it within international organizations. In 2000 the European Union’s Bill of Rights, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union , included in Article 37 an environmental protection norm:

A high level of environmental protection and the improvement of the quality of the environment must be integrated into the policies of the Union and ensured in accordance with the principle of sustainable development.

In 2012 the UN Human Rights Council created a Special Rapporteur (independent expert) on the Environment, eventually approved the right to “a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment”, and forwarded it to the General Assembly—where 80 percent of the world’s countries voted for it (UN Resolution 76/300). Human rights approaches to climate change have also been developed in recent decades (see Bodansky 2009; Caney 2009; Gardiner 2013; and Vanderheiden 2008).

Worries about the proliferation of human rights have not disappeared. Lawyers and international organizations have proposed standards to limit the introduction of new human rights (for example, Alston 1984 and the UN General Assembly 1986). And human rights treaty-making has slowed. After the approval of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in 1999, the only human rights treaty approved by the UN is the 2006 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. In 2007 a declaration (not a treaty) on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was approved by the General Assembly. Prominent philosophers have also advocated smaller lists of human rights (see, for example, Cranston 1967 and 1973; Rawls 1999; and Griffin 2008). Griffin also opposed squeezing new content into existing human rights—which he described as the “ballooning” of rights.

Two familiar philosophical worries about human rights are that they are based on beliefs and attitudes that are culturally relative and that their creation and advocacy involves ethnocentrism. Human rights prescribe universal standards in areas such as security, law enforcement, equality, political participation, and education. The peoples and countries of planet Earth are, however, enormously varied in their practices, traditions, religions, and levels of economic and political development. Putting these two propositions together may be enough to justify the worry that universal human rights do not sufficiently accommodate the diversity of Earth’s peoples. A theoretical expression of this worry is “relativism”, the idea that ethical, political, and legal standards are only true or justified relative to the traditions, beliefs, and conditions of a particular country, culture or region (see the entry on moral relativism ).

During the drafting in 1947 of the Universal Declaration, the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association (“AAA”) warned of the danger that the Declaration would be “a statement of rights conceived only in terms of the values prevalent in Western Europe and America”. A central concern of the AAA Board in the period right after World War II was to condemn intolerant colonialist attitudes of the day and to advocate cultural and political self-determination. But the Board also made the stronger assertion that “standards and values are relative to the culture from which they derive” and thus “what is held to be a human right in one society may be regarded as anti-social by another people” (AAA 1947).

Such assertions have continued to fuel accusations that human rights are instruments of ethnocentrism, arrogance, and cultural imperialism (Renteln 1990). Ethnocentrism is the assumption, usually unconscious, that “one’s own group is the center of everything” and that its beliefs, practices, and norms provide the standards by which other groups are “scaled and rated” (Sumner 1906; see also Etinson 2018a who argues that ethnocentrism is best understood as a kind of cultural bias rather than a belief in cultural superiority). Ethnocentrism can lead to arrogance and intolerance in dealings with other countries, ethical systems, and religions. Finally, cultural imperialism occurs when the economically, technologically, and militarily strongest countries impose their beliefs, values, and institutions on the rest of the world (for a useful discussion of several power-related concerns about human rights, see Gilabert 2018a).

As in the AAA Board’s case, relativists often combine these charges with a prescription, namely that tolerance of varied practices and traditions ought to be instilled and practiced through measures that include extended learning about other cultures. The idea that relativism and exposure to other cultures promote tolerance may be correct from a psychological perspective. People who are sensitive to differences in beliefs, practices, and traditions, and who are suspicious of the grounds for extending norms across borders, may be more inclined to be tolerant of other countries and peoples than those who believe in an objective universal morality. Still, philosophers have been generally critical of attempts to argue from relativism to a prescription of tolerance (see Williams 1972 [1993] and Talbott 2005). If the culture and religion of one country has long fostered intolerant attitudes and practices, and if its citizens and officials act intolerantly towards people from other countries, they are simply following their own traditions and cultural norms. Accordingly, a relativist from a tolerant country will be hard-pressed to find a basis for criticizing the citizens and officials of the intolerant country. To do so the relativist will have to endorse a transcultural principle of tolerance and to advocate as an outsider cultural change in the direction of greater tolerance. Because of this, relativists who are deeply committed to tolerance may find themselves attracted to a qualified commitment to human rights.

Perhaps for these reasons, relativism is not the stance of most anthropologists today. Currently the AAA has a central Committee whose objectives include promoting, protecting, and developing an anthropological perspective on human rights. While still emphasizing the importance of cultural differences, anthropologists now often support the protection of vulnerable cultures, non-discrimination, and the rights and land claims of indigenous peoples (see the AAA’s 2020 Statement on Anthropology and Human Rights).

The conflict between relativists and human rights advocates may be partially based on differences in their underlying philosophical beliefs, particularly in metaethics. Relativists are often subjectivists or noncognitivists and think of morality as entirely socially constructed and transmitted. In contrast, philosophically-inclined human rights advocates are more likely to adhere to or presuppose cognitivism, moral realism, and intuitionism.

As the AAA’s 1947 Statement shows, the accommodation of diversity has been a concern facing the contemporary human rights regime since its inception. As part of a 1946–47 UNESCO inquiry into the theoretical basis of human rights, the French philosopher, Jacques Maritain, famously suggested that universal agreement on human rights was possible so long as questions of underlying justification were ignored: “Yes… we agree about the rights but on condition no one asks us why” (Maritain 1949: 9). The International Bill of Human Rights appears to violate this embargo when it asserts, in the Preamble to both major Covenants, that “these rights derive from the inherent dignity of the human person”. Nonetheless, Maritain’s idea has strong echoes in contemporary philosophical work (see Taylor 1999), including John Rawls’ idea that human rights can have a minimal public or “political” justification which may be accepted from various “comprehensive” religious, moral, and philosophical points of view (Rawls 1999; Beitz 2009). Indeed, some have argued that international human rights law’s justificatory appeal to human dignity should be understood in precisely this ecumenical way (McCrudden 2008).

Other important methods of accommodating diversity include the abstract formulation of human rights norms, which allows for diverse, context-sensitive modes of social and institutional implementation (see Etinson 2013). As discussed in section 1 , a modest understanding of the aims of human rights would leave more room for democratic decision-making at the domestic level, and for cultural and political variation across countries (see also the European Court of Human Rights’ notion of a “margin of appreciation”, discussed in Letsas 2006). And it is worth noting that, within limits, state parties to international human rights treaties are entitled to submit “reservations” that alter the legal effect of treaty provisions as they pertain to that state. This provides a further avenue for legal variation and accommodation.

In the 1990s, Singapore’s Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew and others argued that international human rights as found in United Nations declarations and treaties were insensitive to distinctive “Asian values”, such as prizing families and community (in contrast to strong individualism); putting social harmony over personal freedom; respect for political leaders and institutions; and emphasizing responsibility, hard work, and thriftiness as means of social progress (on the Asian Values debate see Bauer & Bell [eds] 1999; Bell 2000; and Sen 1997). Proponents of the Asian values idea did not wish to abolish all human rights; they rather wanted to deemphasize some families of human rights, particularly the fundamental freedoms and rights of democratic participation (and in some cases the rights of women). They also wanted Western governments and NGOs to stop criticizing them for human rights violations in these areas.

At the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, countries including Singapore, Malaysia, China, and Iran advocated accommodations within human rights practice for cultural and economic differences. Western representatives tended to view the position of these countries as excuses for repression and authoritarianism. The Conference responded by approving the Vienna Declaration . It included in Article 5 the assertion that countries should not pick and choose among human rights:

All human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated. The international community must treat human rights globally in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing, and with the same emphasis. While the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds must be borne in mind, it is the duty of States, regardless of their political, economic and cultural systems, to promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms.

In recent decades widespread acceptance of human rights has occurred in most parts of the world. Three quarters of the world’s countries have ratified the major human rights treaties, and many countries in Africa, the Americas, and Europe participate in regional human rights regimes that have international courts (see the Georgetown University Human Rights Law Research Guide in the Other Internet Resources below). Ratification does not, of course, guarantee compliance. Further, all of the world’s countries now use similar political institutions (law, courts, legislatures, executives, militaries, bureaucracies, police, prisons, taxation, and public schools) and these institutions carry with them characteristic problems and abuses (Donnelly 1989 [2020]). Finally, globalization has diminished the differences among peoples. Today’s world is not the one that early anthropologists and missionaries found. National and cultural boundaries are breached not just by international trade but also by millions of travelers and migrants, electronic communications, international law covering many areas, and the efforts of international governmental and non-governmental organizations. International influences and organizations are everywhere and countries borrow freely and regularly from each other’s inventions and practices.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• The International (UN) Human Rights System , Georgetown Law Library Human Rights Law Research Guide
• International Human Rights Law , United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
• Human Rights entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .

democracy | dignity | equality | equality: of opportunity | ethics: environmental | feminist philosophy, interventions: liberal feminism | globalization | justice: distributive | Kant, Immanuel | Locke, John: political philosophy | moral relativism | moral status, grounds of | Pufendorf, Samuel Freiherr von: moral and political philosophy | Rawls, John | respect | rights | rights: group | rights: of children | social minimum [basic income] | well-being

Acknowledgments

For the 2024 update, Adam Etinson has joined James Nickel in authoring and revising this entry.

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"Why Human Rights?": Reflection by Eleni Christou

This post is the first installment from UChicago Law's International Human Rights Law Clinic in a series titled — The Matter of Human Rights. In this 16-part series, law students examine, question and reflect on the historical, ideological, and normative roots of the human rights system, how the system has evolved, its present challenges and future possibilities. Eleni Christou is a third year in the Law School at the University of Chicago.

Why Human Rights?

By: Eleni Christou University of Chicago Law School Class of 2019

When the term “human rights” is used, it conjures up, for some, powerful images of the righteous fight for the inalienable rights that people have just by virtue of being human. It is Martin Luther King Jr. before the Washington monument as hundreds of thousands gather and look on; it is Nelson Mandela’s long walk to freedom; or a 16-year-old Malala telling her story, so others like her may be heard. But what is beyond these archetypes? Does the system work? Can we make it work better? Is it even the right system for our times? In other words, why human rights?

Human rights are rights that every person has from the moment they are born to the moment they die. They are things that everyone is entitled to, such as life, liberty, freedom of expression, and the right to education, just by virtue of being human. People can never lose these rights on the basis of age, sex, nationality, race, or disability. Human rights offer us a principled framework, rooted in normative values meant for all nations and legal orders. In a world order in which states/governments set the rules, the human rights regime is the counterweight, one concerned with and focused on the individual. In other words, we need human rights because it provides us a way of evaluating and challenging national laws and practices as to the treatment of individuals.

The foundational human right text for our modern-day system is the  Universal Declaration of Human Rights . Adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December, 1948, this document lays out 30 articles which define the rights each human is entitled to. These rights are designed to protect core human values and prohibit institutions and practices that are contrary to the enjoyment of the rights. Rights often complement each other, and at times, can be combined to form new rights. For example, humans have a right to liberty, and also a right to be free from slavery, two rights which complement and reinforce each other. Other times, rights can be in tension, like when a person’s right to freedom of expression infringes upon another’s right to freedom from discrimination.

In this post, I’ll provide an example of how the human rights system has been used to do important work. The international communities’ work to develop the law and organize around human rights principles to challenge and sanction the apartheid regime in South Africa provides a valuable illustration of how the human rights system can be used successfully to alleviate state human rights violations that previously would have been written off as a domestic matter.

From 1948 to 1994, South Africa had a system of racial segregation called ‘ apartheid ,’ literally meaning ‘separateness.’ The minority white population was committing blatant human rights violations to maintain their control over the majority black population, and smaller multiethnic and South Asian communities. This system of apartheid was codified in laws at every level of the country, restricting where non-whites could live, work, and simply be. Non-whites were stripped of  voting rights ,  evicted from their homes  and forced into segregated neighborhoods, and not allowed to travel out of these neighborhoods without  passes . Interracial marriage was forbidden, and transport and civil facilities were all segregated, leading to extremely inferior services for the majority of South Africans. The horrific conditions imposed on non-whites led to  internal resistance movements , which the white ruling class responded to with  extreme violence , leaving thousands dead or imprisoned by the government.

While certain global leaders expressed concern about the Apartheid regime in South Africa, at first, most (including the newly-formed UN) considered it a domestic affair. However, that view changed in 1960 following the  Sharpeville Massacre , where 69 protesters of the travel pass requirement were murdered by South African police. In 1963, the United Nations Security Council passed  Resolution 181 , which called for a voluntary arms embargo against South Africa, which was later made mandatory. The Security Council condemned South Africa’s apartheid regime and encouraged states not to “indirectly [provide] encouragement . . . [of] South Africa to perpetuate, by force, its policy of apartheid,” by participating in the embargo. During this time, many countries, including the United States, ended their arms trade with South Africa. Additionally, the UN urged an oil embargo, and eventually  suspended South Africa  from the General Assembly in 1974.

In 1973, the UN General Assembly passed the  International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid , and it came into force in 1976. This convention made apartheid a crime against humanity. It expanded the prohibition of apartheid and similar policies outside of the South African context, and laid the groundwork for international actions to be taken against any state that engaged in these policies. This also served to further legitimize the international response to South Africa’s apartheid regime.

As the state-sanctioned violence in South Africa intensified, and the global community came to understand the human rights violation being carried out on a massive scale, countries worked domestically to place trade sanctions on South Africa, and many divestment movements gained popular support. International sports teams refused to play in South Africa and cut ties with their sports federations, and many actors engaged in cultural boycotts. These domestic actions worked in tandem with the actions taken by the United Nations, mirroring the increasingly widespread ideology that human rights violations are a global issue that transcend national boundaries, but are an international concern of all peoples.

After years of domestic and international pressure, South African leadership released the resistance leader Nelson Mandela in 1990 and began negotiations for the dismantling of apartheid. In 1994, South Africa’s apartheid officially ended with the first general elections. With universal suffrage, Nelson Mandela was elected president.

In a  speech to the UN General Assembly , newly elected Nelson Mandela recognized the role that the UN and individual countries played in the ending of apartheid, noting these interventions were a success story of the human rights system. The human rights values embodied in the UDHR, the ICSPCA, and numerous UN Security Council resolutions, provided an external normative and legal framework by which the global community could identify unlawful state action and hold South Africa accountable for its system of apartheid. The international pressure applied via the human rights system has been considered a major contributing factor to the end of apartheid. While the country has not fully recovered from the trauma that decades of the apartheid regime had left on its people, the end of the apartheid formal legal system has allowed the country to begin to heal and move towards a government that works for all people, one that has openly embraced international human rights law and principles in its constitutional and legislative framework.

This is what a human rights system can do. When state governments and legal orders fail to protect people within their control, the international system can challenge the national order and demand it uphold a basic standard of good governance. Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the human rights system has grown, tackled new challenges, developed institutions for review and enforcement, and built a significant body of law. Numerous tools have been established to help states, groups, and individuals defend and protect human rights.

So why human rights? Because the human rights system has been a powerful force for good in this world, often the only recourse for marginalized and minority populations. We, as the global community, should work to identify shortcomings in the system, and work together to improve and fix them. We should not —  as the US has been doing under the current administration  — selectively withdraw, defund, and disparage one of the only tools available to the world’s most vulnerable peoples. The human rights system is an arena, a language, and a source of power to many around the world fighting for a worthwhile future built on our shared human values.

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Human Rights Essays

Posted 24 Sep 2024 , 3:20pm By Sharon Natt

Essays from leading experts explore themes ranging from mass atrocities around the world to unprecedented levels of homelessness in the UK. This thought-provoking collection is curated by Labour Campaign for Human Rights and Amnesty UK

All states have a duty – regardless of their political, economic, and cultural systems – to promote and protect all rights for everyone, without discrimination.

However, in recent years, universal human rights have faced unprecedented levels of threat and rollback. Here in the UK, we have seen a raft of legislation which has removed fundamental rights protections, often in contradiction to the UK’s obligations under international law. Internationally, we see other governments increasingly acting with impunity, violating international human rights and humanitarian law with no consequence; and undermining the international rules-based system which protects us all.

Human rights protections were born out of the ashes, horror and devastation of World War II to act as a global roadmap to freedom, equality and dignity – protecting the rights of every individual, everywhere. Over the last 75 years they have underpinned many of the positive transformations that the world has seen; from decolonialisation across continents, to the reunification of the European continent after the Cold War, to challenging systems of structural racism in countries right across the world.

Centring human rights provides a clear framework for policy makers who want to change lives and improve public services for the better, in equitable, fair and just ways. The Human Rights Act in the UK, for example, has not only enabled people to claim their rights when things have gone wrong, but has ushered in systems of decision making in our national and local policy making that better respect rights in the first place. In this way, any government designing and delivering its agenda should see human rights principles as key to providing solutions to policy challenges and direction for the best use of precious resources.

That’s why Amnesty International UK is urging our new government to be proud of the role the UK has played over decades in building and respecting global human rights frameworks and laws, but also to recognise that over recent years the UK has squandered its reputation and leadership by inconsistently supporting and practising those principles at home and abroad. We now urge the government to truly prioritise promoting and protecting our rights, because while politics might not be for everyone, human rights are.

As part of this work, we are delighted to partner with the Labour Campaign for Human Rights in this collection of essays to bring together a range of voices and expertise from across society – including rights holders, barristers, teachers, union representatives, NGOs and politicians. Each of these essays provides a unique and compelling perspective on what this government could do to truly champion human rights now and in the future.

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As ever, our mission to protect human rights remains. Please donate today to help expose war crimes and protect human rights. Thank you.

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Essay on Human Rights: Samples in 500 and 1500

• Updated on  
• Jun 20, 2024

Essay writing is an integral part of the school curriculum and various academic and competitive exams like IELTS , TOEFL , SAT , UPSC , etc. It is designed to test your command of the English language and how well you can gather your thoughts and present them in a structure with a flow. To master your ability to write an essay, you must read as much as possible and practise on any given topic. This blog brings you a detailed guide on how to write an essay on Human Rights , with useful essay samples on Human rights.

This Blog Includes:

The basic human rights, 200 words essay on human rights, 500 words essay on human rights, 500+ words essay on human rights in india, 1500 words essay on human rights, importance of human rights, essay on human rights pdf, what are human rights.

Human rights mark everyone as free and equal, irrespective of age, gender, caste, creed, religion and nationality. The United Nations adopted human rights in light of the atrocities people faced during the Second World War. On the 10th of December 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Its adoption led to the recognition of human rights as the foundation for freedom, justice and peace for every individual. Although it’s not legally binding, most nations have incorporated these human rights into their constitutions and domestic legal frameworks. Human rights safeguard us from discrimination and guarantee that our most basic needs are protected.

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Before we move on to the essays on human rights, let’s check out the basics of what they are.

Also Read: What are Human Rights?

Also Read: 7 Impactful Human Rights Movies Everyone Must Watch!

Here is a 200-word short sample essay on basic Human Rights.

Human rights are a set of rights given to every human being regardless of their gender, caste, creed, religion, nation, location or economic status. These are said to be moral principles that illustrate certain standards of human behaviour. Protected by law , these rights are applicable everywhere and at any time. Basic human rights include the right to life, right to a fair trial, right to remedy by a competent tribunal, right to liberty and personal security, right to own property, right to education, right of peaceful assembly and association, right to marriage and family, right to nationality and freedom to change it, freedom of speech, freedom from discrimination, freedom from slavery, freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of movement, right of opinion and information, right to adequate living standard and freedom from interference with privacy, family, home and correspondence.

Also Read: Law Courses

Check out this 500-word long essay on Human Rights.

Every person has dignity and value. One of the ways that we recognise the fundamental worth of every person is by acknowledging and respecting their human rights. Human rights are a set of principles concerned with equality and fairness. They recognise our freedom to make choices about our lives and develop our potential as human beings. They are about living a life free from fear, harassment or discrimination.

Human rights can broadly be defined as the basic rights that people worldwide have agreed are essential. These include the right to life, the right to a fair trial, freedom from torture and other cruel and inhuman treatment, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to health, education and an adequate standard of living. These human rights are the same for all people everywhere – men and women, young and old, rich and poor, regardless of our background, where we live, what we think or believe. This basic property is what makes human rights’ universal’.

Human rights connect us all through a shared set of rights and responsibilities. People’s ability to enjoy their human rights depends on other people respecting those rights. This means that human rights involve responsibility and duties towards other people and the community. Individuals have a responsibility to ensure that they exercise their rights with consideration for the rights of others. For example, when someone uses their right to freedom of speech, they should do so without interfering with someone else’s right to privacy.

Governments have a particular responsibility to ensure that people can enjoy their rights. They must establish and maintain laws and services that enable people to enjoy a life in which their rights are respected and protected. For example, the right to education says that everyone is entitled to a good education. Therefore, governments must provide good quality education facilities and services to their people. If the government fails to respect or protect their basic human rights, people can take it into account.

Values of tolerance, equality and respect can help reduce friction within society. Putting human rights ideas into practice can help us create the kind of society we want to live in. There has been tremendous growth in how we think about and apply human rights ideas in recent decades. This growth has had many positive results – knowledge about human rights can empower individuals and offer solutions for specific problems.

Human rights are an important part of how people interact with others at all levels of society – in the family, the community, school, workplace, politics and international relations. Therefore, people everywhere must strive to understand what human rights are. When people better understand human rights, it is easier for them to promote justice and the well-being of society. 

Also Read: Important Articles in Indian Constitution

Here is a human rights essay focused on India.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. It has been rightly proclaimed in the American Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Created with certain unalienable rights….” Similarly, the Indian Constitution has ensured and enshrined Fundamental rights for all citizens irrespective of caste, creed, religion, colour, sex or nationality. These basic rights, commonly known as human rights, are recognised the world over as basic rights with which every individual is born.

In recognition of human rights, “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was made on the 10th of December, 1948. This declaration is the basic instrument of human rights. Even though this declaration has no legal bindings and authority, it forms the basis of all laws on human rights. The necessity of formulating laws to protect human rights is now being felt all over the world. According to social thinkers, the issue of human rights became very important after World War II concluded. It is important for social stability both at the national and international levels. Wherever there is a breach of human rights, there is conflict at one level or the other.

Given the increasing importance of the subject, it becomes necessary that educational institutions recognise the subject of human rights as an independent discipline. The course contents and curriculum of the discipline of human rights may vary according to the nature and circumstances of a particular institution. Still, generally, it should include the rights of a child, rights of minorities, rights of the needy and the disabled, right to live, convention on women, trafficking of women and children for sexual exploitation etc.

Since the formation of the United Nations , the promotion and protection of human rights have been its main focus. The United Nations has created a wide range of mechanisms for monitoring human rights violations. The conventional mechanisms include treaties and organisations, U.N. special reporters, representatives and experts and working groups. Asian countries like China argue in favour of collective rights. According to Chinese thinkers, European countries lay stress upon individual rights and values while Asian countries esteem collective rights and obligations to the family and society as a whole.

With the freedom movement the world over after World War II, the end of colonisation also ended the policy of apartheid and thereby the most aggressive violation of human rights. With the spread of education, women are asserting their rights. Women’s movements play an important role in spreading the message of human rights. They are fighting for their rights and supporting the struggle for human rights of other weaker and deprived sections like bonded labour, child labour, landless labour, unemployed persons, Dalits and elderly people.

Unfortunately, violation of human rights continues in most parts of the world. Ethnic cleansing and genocide can still be seen in several parts of the world. Large sections of the world population are deprived of the necessities of life i.e. food, shelter and security of life. Right to minimum basic needs viz. Work, health care, education and shelter are denied to them. These deprivations amount to the negation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Also Read: Human Rights Courses

Check out this detailed 1500-word essay on human rights.

The human right to live and exist, the right to equality, including equality before the law, non-discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, and equality of opportunity in matters of employment, the right to freedom of speech and expression, assembly, association, movement, residence, the right to practice any profession or occupation, the right against exploitation, prohibiting all forms of forced labour, child labour and trafficking in human beings, the right to freedom of conscience, practice and propagation of religion and the right to legal remedies for enforcement of the above are basic human rights. These rights and freedoms are the very foundations of democracy.

Obviously, in a democracy, the people enjoy the maximum number of freedoms and rights. Besides these are political rights, which include the right to contest an election and vote freely for a candidate of one’s choice. Human rights are a benchmark of a developed and civilised society. But rights cannot exist in a vacuum. They have their corresponding duties. Rights and duties are the two aspects of the same coin.

Liberty never means license. Rights presuppose the rule of law, where everyone in the society follows a code of conduct and behaviour for the good of all. It is the sense of duty and tolerance that gives meaning to rights. Rights have their basis in the ‘live and let live’ principle. For example, my right to speech and expression involves my duty to allow others to enjoy the same freedom of speech and expression. Rights and duties are inextricably interlinked and interdependent. A perfect balance is to be maintained between the two. Whenever there is an imbalance, there is chaos.

A sense of tolerance, propriety and adjustment is a must to enjoy rights and freedom. Human life sans basic freedom and rights is meaningless. Freedom is the most precious possession without which life would become intolerable, a mere abject and slavish existence. In this context, Milton’s famous and oft-quoted lines from his Paradise Lost come to mind: “To reign is worth ambition though in hell/Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.”

However, liberty cannot survive without its corresponding obligations and duties. An individual is a part of society in which he enjoys certain rights and freedom only because of the fulfilment of certain duties and obligations towards others. Thus, freedom is based on mutual respect’s rights. A fine balance must be maintained between the two, or there will be anarchy and bloodshed. Therefore, human rights can best be preserved and protected in a society steeped in morality, discipline and social order.

Violation of human rights is most common in totalitarian and despotic states. In the theocratic states, there is much persecution, and violation in the name of religion and the minorities suffer the most. Even in democracies, there is widespread violation and infringement of human rights and freedom. The women, children and the weaker sections of society are victims of these transgressions and violence.

The U.N. Commission on Human Rights’ main concern is to protect and promote human rights and freedom in the world’s nations. In its various sessions held from time to time in Geneva, it adopts various measures to encourage worldwide observations of these basic human rights and freedom. It calls on its member states to furnish information regarding measures that comply with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights whenever there is a complaint of a violation of these rights. In addition, it reviews human rights situations in various countries and initiates remedial measures when required.

The U.N. Commission was much concerned and dismayed at the apartheid being practised in South Africa till recently. The Secretary-General then declared, “The United Nations cannot tolerate apartheid. It is a legalised system of racial discrimination, violating the most basic human rights in South Africa. It contradicts the letter and spirit of the United Nations Charter. That is why over the last forty years, my predecessors and I have urged the Government of South Africa to dismantle it.”

Now, although apartheid is no longer practised in that country, other forms of apartheid are being blatantly practised worldwide. For example, sex apartheid is most rampant. Women are subject to abuse and exploitation. They are not treated equally and get less pay than their male counterparts for the same jobs. In employment, promotions, possession of property etc., they are most discriminated against. Similarly, the rights of children are not observed properly. They are forced to work hard in very dangerous situations, sexually assaulted and exploited, sold and bonded for labour.

The Commission found that religious persecution, torture, summary executions without judicial trials, intolerance, slavery-like practices, kidnapping, political disappearance, etc., are being practised even in the so-called advanced countries and societies. The continued acts of extreme violence, terrorism and extremism in various parts of the world like Pakistan, India, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Somalia, Algeria, Lebanon, Chile, China, and Myanmar, etc., by the governments, terrorists, religious fundamentalists, and mafia outfits, etc., is a matter of grave concern for the entire human race.

Violation of freedom and rights by terrorist groups backed by states is one of the most difficult problems society faces. For example, Pakistan has been openly collaborating with various terrorist groups, indulging in extreme violence in India and other countries. In this regard the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva adopted a significant resolution, which was co-sponsored by India, focusing on gross violation of human rights perpetrated by state-backed terrorist groups.

The resolution expressed its solidarity with the victims of terrorism and proposed that a U.N. Fund for victims of terrorism be established soon. The Indian delegation recalled that according to the Vienna Declaration, terrorism is nothing but the destruction of human rights. It shows total disregard for the lives of innocent men, women and children. The delegation further argued that terrorism cannot be treated as a mere crime because it is systematic and widespread in its killing of civilians.

Violation of human rights, whether by states, terrorists, separatist groups, armed fundamentalists or extremists, is condemnable. Regardless of the motivation, such acts should be condemned categorically in all forms and manifestations, wherever and by whomever they are committed, as acts of aggression aimed at destroying human rights, fundamental freedom and democracy. The Indian delegation also underlined concerns about the growing connection between terrorist groups and the consequent commission of serious crimes. These include rape, torture, arson, looting, murder, kidnappings, blasts, and extortion, etc.

Violation of human rights and freedom gives rise to alienation, dissatisfaction, frustration and acts of terrorism. Governments run by ambitious and self-seeking people often use repressive measures and find violence and terror an effective means of control. However, state terrorism, violence, and human freedom transgressions are very dangerous strategies. This has been the background of all revolutions in the world. Whenever there is systematic and widespread state persecution and violation of human rights, rebellion and revolution have taken place. The French, American, Russian and Chinese Revolutions are glowing examples of human history.

The first war of India’s Independence in 1857 resulted from long and systematic oppression of the Indian masses. The rapidly increasing discontent, frustration and alienation with British rule gave rise to strong national feelings and demand for political privileges and rights. Ultimately the Indian people, under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, made the British leave India, setting the country free and independent.

Human rights and freedom ought to be preserved at all costs. Their curtailment degrades human life. The political needs of a country may reshape Human rights, but they should not be completely distorted. Tyranny, regimentation, etc., are inimical of humanity and should be resisted effectively and united. The sanctity of human values, freedom and rights must be preserved and protected. Human Rights Commissions should be established in all countries to take care of human freedom and rights. In cases of violation of human rights, affected individuals should be properly compensated, and it should be ensured that these do not take place in future.

These commissions can become effective instruments in percolating the sensitivity to human rights down to the lowest levels of governments and administrations. The formation of the National Human Rights Commission in October 1993 in India is commendable and should be followed by other countries.

Also Read: Law Courses in India

Human rights are of utmost importance to seek basic equality and human dignity. Human rights ensure that the basic needs of every human are met. They protect vulnerable groups from discrimination and abuse, allow people to stand up for themselves, and follow any religion without fear and give them the freedom to express their thoughts freely. In addition, they grant people access to basic education and equal work opportunities. Thus implementing these rights is crucial to ensure freedom, peace and safety.

Human Rights Day is annually celebrated on the 10th of December.

Human Rights Day is celebrated to commemorate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UNGA in 1948.

Some of the common Human Rights are the right to life and liberty, freedom of opinion and expression, freedom from slavery and torture and the right to work and education.

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We hope our sample essays on Human Rights have given you some great ideas. For more information on such interesting blogs, visit our essay writing page and follow Leverage Edu .

Sonal is a creative, enthusiastic writer and editor who has worked extensively for the Study Abroad domain. She splits her time between shooting fun insta reels and learning new tools for content marketing. If she is missing from her desk, you can find her with a group of people cracking silly jokes or petting neighbourhood dogs.

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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948, was the result of the experience of the Second World War. With the end of that war, and the creation of the United Nations, the international community vowed to never again allow atrocities like those of that conflict to happen again. World leaders decided to complement the UN Charter with a road map to guarantee the rights of every individual everywhere. The document they considered, and which would later become the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was taken up at the first session of the General Assembly in 1946. 

The Assembly reviewed this draft Declaration on Fundamental Human Rights and Freedoms and transmitted it to the Economic and Social Council "for reference to the Commission on Human Rights for consideration . . . in its preparation of an international bill of rights." The Commission, at its first session early in 1947, authorized its members to formulate what it termed "a preliminary draft International Bill of Human Rights". Later the work was taken over by a formal drafting committee, consisting of members of the Commission from eight States, selected with due regard for geographical distribution.

The Commission on Human Rights was made up of 18 members from various political, cultural and religious backgrounds. Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of American President Franklin D. Roosevelt, chaired the UDHR drafting committee. With her were René Cassin of France, who composed the first draft of the Declaration, the Committee Rapporteur Charles Malik of Lebanon, Vice-Chairman Peng Chung Chang of China, and John Humphrey of Canada, Director of the UN’s Human Rights Division, who prepared the Declaration’s blueprint. But Mrs. Roosevelt was recognized as the driving force for the Declaration’s adoption.

The Commission met for the first time in 1947. In her memoirs, Eleanor Roosevelt recalled:

Dr. Chang was a pluralist and held forth in charming fashion on the proposition that there is more than one kind of ultimate reality.  The Declaration, he said, should reflect more than simply Western ideas and Dr. Humphrey would have to be eclectic in his approach.  His remark, though addressed to Dr. Humphrey, was really directed at Dr. Malik, from whom it drew a prompt retort as he expounded at some length the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.  Dr. Humphrey joined enthusiastically in the discussion, and I remember that at one point Dr. Chang suggested that the Secretariat might well spend a few months studying the fundamentals of Confucianism!

The final draft by Cassin was handed to the Commission on Human Rights, which was being held in Geneva. The draft declaration sent out to all UN member States for comments became known as the Geneva draft.

The first draft of the Declaration was proposed in September 1948 with over 50 Member States participating in the final drafting. By its resolution 217 A (III) of 10 December 1948, the General Assembly, meeting in Paris, adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with eight nations abstaining from the vote but none dissenting. Hernán Santa Cruz of Chile, member of the drafting sub-Committee, wrote:

I perceived clearly that I was participating in a truly significant historic event in which a consensus had been reached as to the supreme value of the human person, a value that did not originate in the decision of a worldly power, but rather in the fact of existing—which gave rise to the inalienable right to live free from want and oppression and to fully develop one’s personality.  In the Great Hall…there was an atmosphere of genuine solidarity and brotherhood among men and women from all latitudes, the like of which I have not seen again in any international setting.

The entire text of the UDHR was composed in less than two years. At a time when the world was divided into Eastern and Western blocks, finding a common ground on what should make the essence of the document proved to be a colossal task.

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240 Human Rights Essay Topics & Examples

Whether you’re interested in exploring enduring issues, social justice, or democracy, see the ideas below. Along with human rights topics for essays and other papers, our experts have prepared writing tips for you.

• ✅ Tips for Writing Essays on Human Rights

🏆 Best Human Rights Topic Ideas & Essay Examples

🥇 most interesting human rights topics for essays, 🎓 simple & easy human rights essay topics, 💡 great human rights research topics, 🔎 interesting topics to write about human rights, ❓ essay questions on human rights.

If you’re starting a discussion on human rights, essay examples on the subject can really help you with argumentation. And if you’re assigned to come up with a research paper or speech on it, a good idea is a must for an excellent grade. Good thing you’ve found this list of human rights essay topics!

✅ 9 Tips for Writing Essays on Human Rights

The recognition of people’s rights through proper laws preserves human dignity. This broadness means that human rights essay topics range in scope drastically, requiring you to bring together different kinds of ideas in a single paper.

Thus, you may need to keep in mind particular tips, from structural advice to correct terminology, to write an excellent human rights essay.

Do your research before you start working on your outline. Searching for book and journal titles beforehand will not only help you understand your topic better but also help you structure your thoughts, affecting your structure for the better.

Compiling a bibliography early will also save you from the mess, which comes from ordering and standardizing your sources as you go.

After you have your reference page ready, draft a human rights essay outline.

Make it as detailed or as simple as you need, because what is essential is that you divide your topics evenly between your paragraphs or subheadings.

Doing so will ensure that you have a comprehensive essay that helps advance academic knowledge on a particular subject, rather than an overpowered paper aimed at a single problem.

Write your thesis statement as your final prewriting step. Excellent thesis examples should state the theme explicitly and leave your reader with an accurate understanding of what you are trying to achieve in your paper.

Skipping or ignoring this phase may leave your work disoriented and without a definite purpose.

Keep in mind your chosen human rights essay questions when writing. Going off theme will never get you good marks with your instructor.

If you are writing from a cultural relativism point of view, then do you have the word-count to argue about moral relativism? Do not forget that everything you write should advance your central thesis and never undermine it!

Get a good grasp on the relevant terminology. Confusing human nature with the human condition is never a good start to a paper that aspires to shed light on one subject or the other.

You can start writing down the terms that you find useful or intriguing during your research phase to help you gain a better understanding of their meaning.

Understand the correct time and place to qualify or refute certain statements. Arguing against the children’s right to basic needs may never be appropriate in an academic setting. Acknowledge the arguable cases, and subvert these to your benefit, as an essayist.

Interest your audience with essay hooks and exciting facts. Academia is not a dull place, and your readers may find themselves more willing to engage with your work if they find it enjoyable, rather than dry and formalistic. Doing so will also demonstrate your good grasp on the subject!

Remain respectful of your chosen case, and remember that you are writing about a subject that experiences hundreds of daily violations.

Recognizing the dangerous nature of your paper will not only help you separate beneficial facts from superficial ones but may also allow you to hone your academic integrity.

Read sample essays online to gain a better understanding of what essay mechanics will work and which you can leave unused. This extra reading may also give you good human rights essay ideas to begin writing your paper!

However, remember that plagiarism is a punishable offense, unlike the simple act of becoming inspired by others’ work. Want to see some samples? Head over to IvyPanda and jump-start your paper!

• Three Generations of Human Rights Development The current legal recognition of human rights attainment originated from various declarations and the most pronounced included the Magna Carta declaration in the thirteenth century that curtailed the royal powers, the American declaration of independence […]
• McDonald’s: Human Rights and Environmental Sustainability Core values of the company One of the core values of the company is the respect for the fundamental rights of human beings.
• Definition of Human Rights Human rights are freedoms established by custom or international agreement that impose standards of conduct on all nations.
• How Nike Sweatshops in Asia Violate Human Rights Factors that facilitated the emergence and development of Nike sweatshops included the availability of cheap labor, lower costs of production, lower wages, the restriction on the labor movements by the local authorities, and the poor […]
• The Challenge of Human Rights and Cultural Diversity It is however true that the existence of universal human rights is compromised by cultural relativism. In addition, it is wrong to assume that cultural relativism would interfere with the efficacy of these universal human […]
• Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies for Human Rights Established in 1919 as the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the organization has been very instrumental in championing the improvement of human rights and the reduction of human suffering.
• Effects of War on Humanity in Terms of Human Rights The effects not only affect the coalition governments in war, but also members of the attacked countries for instance, Iraq people recorded the greatest number of fatalities and casualties during the Iraq war.
• The Origin of the Human Rights Concept This point out to the fact that there were rights in the document that are common to different parts of the world and that they were not only obtained from the western nations’ practices of […]
• Human Rights Poster Design and Analysis First, I realised that placing the title or theme of the poster at a strategic point goes a long way to draw the attention of the target audience.
• Basic Human Rights Violation The Human Rights Watch was formed in the year 1978 following the creation of the Helsinki Watch. The issue of terrorism has posed the greatest challenge in the operations of the Human Rights Watch.
• The Universality of Human Rights In contrast to the other institutions that suggest a single form of the notion existing in the given society, the area of human rights allows to switch the shapes of the very notion of human […]
• Human Rights and Social Transformation Skeptics challenges the origin, contribution of globalization to the advancement of human rights, tension posed on security due to strict adherence to codes of human rights, human rights contribution to universality evaluated in relation to […]
• The Case of Malala: Is Education a Basic Human Right? Additionally, understanding the social and cultural dimensions of gender inequality in education allows one to determine the policy issues that cause the problem and thus establish a mechanism for preventing its reoccurrence in the future.
• United States and UAE Human Rights Comparison The nation’s denial of freedom of expression and religion, as well as its discrimination against women and the punishment of same-sex intercourse with the death penalty, are among the most prominent issues.
• Impact of Human Rights on Society Democratic space is an indication of tolerance and consideration of the people on the part of the government, since it shows that the voice of the people has a preference over any single person.
• Human Rights History and Approaches Further development of the concept of human rights was reflected in the European Middle Ages, the eras of renaissance and enlightenment, and the idea of empowering all people, based on the concept of “natural law”.
• Malala Yousafzai – Pakistani Human Rights Activist The world learned about the girl after a gunman burst into a school bus and shot the girl in the head, thereby avenging her criticism of the Taliban and neglecting the prohibition to attend school.
• Current Human Rights Issues Social rights go hand in hand with human rights since most of them are defined in declarations and treaties of human rights.
• Human Rights in the Movie Escape From Sobibor As a result of the escape, the Nazi Authorities were made to shutdown the camp and planted trees The Second World War was a period during which a lot of violations of the human rights […]
• Theocratic Government’s Census and Human Rights The primary idea of the paper is to disclose moral opacities of the issue, conduct stakeholder impact analysis, and speculate on the collision of values of the theocratic governments and people.
• Human Rights Interventions Mindful declarations therefore strive to educate and promote the respect for rights and freedoms and implementation of progressive measures that secure the recognition of the importance and observance of the freedoms and rights3.
• What Are Human Rights? Nevertheless, even though that nowadays the concept of ‘human rights’ is being commonly discussed, as such that applies to all people, regardless of what happened to be the specifics of their ethno-cultural affiliation and their […]
• Global Community and Human Rights The development of a global community holds a lot of promise for the improvement of human rights. This is attainable by implementing a common code of human rights across the globe along the lines of […]
• “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights” by Hillary Clinton Hillary Clinton’s speech about women’s rights effectively convinces her audience that women rights are an indispensable part of human rights through the use of logical argument, repetition, historical facts, and emotional stories.
• How Corruption Violates Fundamental Human Rights of Citizens This essay seeks to establish how corruption leads to breach of fundamental human rights of citizens and determine which rights in particular are mostly risky due to corruption.
• Basic Technology and Human Rights If some people are able to enjoy the facilities being introduced as a result of technological improvisations, and it reaches to a chosen few, with no chance in sight of reaching out to large number […]
• Human Rights: Fredin v. Sweden Legal Case In this situation, the court considered a case that affected the protection of nature and the human right to own property and sentenced in favor of the state.
• Child Labor Issue According to the Human Rights The International Labor Organization defines child labor as “work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential, and their dignity, and that is harmful to physical and mental development”1 Being a United Nations agency, ILO […]
• Social Media: A Force for Political and Human Rights Changes Worldwide In this essay, I will discuss the effectiveness of traditional media and social media, and how social media has a better participation in changing the world in terms of politics and human rights.
• Human Rights Violations in Today’s World This paper addresses questions regarding human rights, including the United Nations’ involvement in enforcing those rights violations and the role of non-governmental organizations in addressing the issue.
• Thomas Jefferson as a Defender of Human Rights In conclusion, Thomas Jefferson was a steadfast defender of human rights, but most importantly, he fought for the rights of black people.
• Strategic Planning: Human Rights Watch The company’s competitive position represents the largest coverage of countries in various areas: monitoring military conflicts, protecting access to medicine, addressing and the rights of vulnerable segments of the population.
• Human Rights and Justice Sector: Article Review The central problem is the complex of new African American control institutions made up of the carceral system and the ruins of the dark ghetto.
• The Native Human Rights: Intergenerational Trauma Following are some strategies for addressing Indian citizens’ unique status, ways in which the fundamental right of Indians adheres, the practice of civil rights, the right to ownership of water, the right to be allowed […]
• Human Rights Reforms in the Arab World In modern history, the theme of human rights reformations in the Arab World has been influenced by the French and America Revolutions.
• Freedom of Speech as a Basic Human Right Restricting or penalizing freedom of expression is thus a negative issue because it confines the population of truth, as well as rationality, questioning, and the ability of people to think independently and express their thoughts.
• Violation of Human Rights: Tuskegee Syphilis Study The authors of the study and the authorities tried to justify human rights violations by saying that they were analyzing the effects of fully developing syphilis on Black males.
• Human Rights Violation in US Sports Despite the advancement in human rights in the most significant part of society, sports in various parts of the globe continue to cultivate actions of human rights violation.
• Cultural Heritage and Human Rights in France For example, the imagination of the inhabitants of this region manifested itself vividly in many ways during the development and construction of the famous Notre Dame Cathedral.
• Retirement Options: Putting Human Rights to Work The employers consider terminating the old employees for their personal safety and the company’s economic stability. Therefore, public awareness stimulates action against discrimination and allows the employees to support the older people at work.
• Environmental, Social, and Governance Relating to Human Rights It is impossible to ignore the fact that the ESG trend can significantly affect the sphere of human rights in the energy sector.
• Biomedical Research Ethics and Human Rights This paper aims to discuss the impact of the history of research ethics on modern approaches and the protection of the rights of human subjects.
• The Absolute Human Right Not to Be Tortured The case against the prohibition of absoluteness contrary to torment and associated types of cruelty in universal law queries the ethical and legal conventions that form the foundation of the event of terrorism.
• Human Rights Issues: Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans Hurricane Katrina is considered one of the worst calamities in the history of the United States. The law of the United States gives the government the responsibility to protect the lives of its citizens.
• Rhetoric and Reality of Human Rights Protection For example, the prohibition of homosexuality in many countries of Africa and the Middle East, the restriction of China and Russia’s citizen’s freedoms, and the dictatorship of Africa and Latin America.
• Why Do Good? Human Rights Violations in Afghanistan To be more specific, this is because the main essence of Bentham’s philosophical standpoint is that only those actions which bring happiness and pleasure to others are morally right.
• Human Rights and the United Nations Charter The most significant resemblance of the New Laws of The Indies and Human Rights Law of the United Nations is the obligation to consider human rights as the primary basis for establishing the local regulations.
• Understanding Human Rights in Australia Needless to say, the key objective of this Act has been to improve the standards of legislation processes in the region.
• Understanding of Human Rights This provides us with a clue, as to what should account for the line of legal reasoning, regarding the illegality of the ‘burqa ban’, on the part of French Muslims in the European Court of […]
• Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Protest as a Violation of Human Rights Standing Rock claims that the pipeline would damage the sacred sites of their ancestors and is potentially harmful to the local environment and the economic situation of the tribe.
• Bridging the Line Between a Human Right and a Worker’s Choice Workers’ rights, in that sense, constitute one of the most important aspects of the human rights issue because many workers are willing to face peril if the market is able to pay a sufficient price.
• The UN Declaration of Human Rights & The UN Millennium Project Human rights are “international norms that help to protect all people everywhere from severe political, legal, and social abuses”.
• Social Media and Human Rights Memorandum Considering a recent scandal with Facebook’s failure to protect people’s data in the Cambridge Analytica breach, it is feasible to dwell on the topic of human rights protection within the Internet.
• Labor and Monopoly. Human Rights Simultaneously, the laborers do not enjoy any control on design and production over the work, thus, the staff are uncomfortable with their work. However, in the case of flight attendants, the profession is different in […]
• Reaction Paper about Treaty Bodies of Human Rights 2020 Therefore, it is important to evaluate the prospects of budget issues due to COVID-19, communication challenges due to reduced human contacts and pandemic concerns affecting human right defense as well as the general secretary’s rejection […]
• Human Rights in Islam and West Instead, it would stick to drafting standards and stay out of the actual developments and problems of the Stalinist Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and its colonies, and the segregationist United States and other powers […]
• African Human Rights Protection Many human rights activists have come forward to champion the rights of the minorities and in some instances agitate for democratic governance.
• Joseph Kony’s Violations of Human Rights Even so, conflicts in the 21st century are unique in that the warring parties are obliged to follow some rules of engagement and to respect human rights.
• Human Rights: Violated Historical and Ethical Principles The people in most of the research did not have a choice. The people in the experiments did not have the right to beneficence.
• Public International Law of Human Rights The present paper examines three important decisions issued by the International Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights in the field of state responsibility, human rights, and rights and duties of international […]
• US & UK Human Rights While Countering Terrorism The threat of terror and the further legal reactions of the nations to the problem were considered as challenging, and it is necessary to examine differences and similarities associated with the promotion of human rights […]
• Dignity: Is It a Basic Human Right and How to Protect of Self-Worth and Self-Determination? The problem has raised the issue of assisted suicide to end a life of suffering and the role of such a patient in deciding when and how they will die rather than waiting for the […]
• International Human Rights Opinion and Removing a Constitutionally Elected Government in Fiji It is believed that the gross overreaction of the military in the internal affairs of the Methodist church in Fiji has paved the way for international focus to be centered in this island, especially in […]
• Human Rights Act 1998 in British Legal System The safeguard of British liberty is in the good sense of the people and in the system of representative and responsible government which has been evolved”.[The Business of Judging] Such an approach isolated British constitutional […]
• Human Rights in Russia: A 2020 Report Concentrating on the Last Changes Overall, expert opinion on the outcomes of human rights in Russia in the future shows a lack of certainty the country’s record of infringements is going to improve. It is imperative to support the promotion […]
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Daily Briefs UN experts and ambassadors of foreign countries, including the US and the EU, responded to this violation, calling not to use weapons and allow the people to express their will.
• Will the Development of Artificial Intelligence Endanger Global Human Rights? The contradiction between the advantages of AI and the limitation of human rights manifests in the field of personal privacy to a larger extent.
• St. Johns Agency and Human Rights: Universal Policies to Support Human Rights The right to health as an inclusive right is one of the elements which states that the right is not only associated with access to health care facilities and services. The company incorporates various aspects […]
• History II, Early Human Rights Debates: The Truth About Pirates and the Social Justification The reading by Mark Roth describes the hidden historical truth behind pirates and their deceptive view by the modern society. This historical document depicts one of the earliest accounts of the mistreatment of Native Americans […]
• Universal Human Rights on The Case of MV Tampa On the other hand, the country was enforcing its own right to protect the citizens from the perceived danger a justified precaution in light of numerous cases of illegal immigration and terrorist attacks.
• Human Rights Violations by Police: Accountable in Discharging Their Duties Corey in his study and reflection on two mass exonerations, that is, the Rampart and Tulia exonerations, identified police misconduct, and in particular perjury as the primary cause for wrongful convictions.
• Human Rights Obligations of Multinational Corporations The argument of whether it is valid to impose obligations on violation of human rights on MNCs calls to reason the minimum caliber MNCs should maintain in their obligations towards human rights.
• Human Rights Issues in Australia: Bullying Among School-Going Age and Young People The focus of the topic of the day is on bullying. It is used to prevent or avoid the occurrence of a bullying experience.
• Tortures as the Form of Human Rights Abuse The law of the country must allow persons tortured in any form to be permitted to make an official complaint and investigation to be started on the credibility of the person.
• Is FGM a Human Rights Issue in the Development of Humanism and Equality? Among the problems faced by developed states that receive migrants from third-world countries, the protection of women’s and girls’ rights in the field of reproductive health stands out.
• Shirin Ebadi’s Perspective on Women’s Human Rights Activism and Islam It is worth noting that Shirin Ebadi’s self-identity as an Iranian woman and a Muslim empowers her experience and perspective in women’s rights activism.
• United States Role in Support of Universal Human Rights The first thing is to put an end to extrajudicial killings and detentions which will be in a bid to end intrusion to the freedom and the right to truth and justice.
• Universal Jurisdiction for Human Rights One of the most prominent roles in this process was played by the implementation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN, by the development of the national and intercultural awareness of various […]
• Human Rights: Humanitarian Intervention Some of these are the right to liberty, the right to life, the right of the freedom to think and express oneself, and finally the right to receive equal handling as regards issues relating to […]
• Social Factors in the US History: Respect for Human Rights, Racial Equality, and Religious Freedom The very first years of the existence of the country were marked by the initiatives of people to provide as much freedom in all aspects of social life as possible.
• South Africa: Human Rights in the Constitution The Bill of Rights serves as the foundation upon which the democratic character of the Republic of South Africa is built.
• Human Rights: Development, Commission, Listening, Monitoring The final draft of the Declaration was handed to the Commission being held in Geneva, therefore, the draft declaration that was sent to all UN member states for commentary is known as the Geneva draft.
• Human Rights in China, Tibet and Dafur In spite of the progress, achieved in the process of regulating the situation, and the ongoing process of peaceful settlement, the atmosphere of intensity is preserved in the country, and scale military attacks on innocent […]
• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights The Universal Declaration of Human Rights should be analyzed within the context of the political, cultural, and religious situation, emerging in the middle of the twentieth century.
• Vehicle Impoundment “HOON” Laws Are an Infringement of People’s Human Rights The other dimension presents the argument that the laws are meant for the well being of the pepole articulating that the legislation is in fact designed for the protection of the civil rights of the […]
• Human Rights and International Business The article deals with the crisis in Burma and the role of India and China in this crisis. Even though it might appear that the major theme of discussion is international politics, from the first […]
• Human Rights Violation in Kosovo The paper has discussed the massive violation of Human Rights in Kosovo, The International Community’s reaction and actions to the Kosovo crisis, and i have given my suggestions to the community on regard to Kosovo […]
• How Has Globalization Impacted on Issues of Human Rights? William Adler closely examines the disrupted lives of the three women who occupy an assembly-line job as the job and its company moves from New Jersey to rural Mississippi and to Matamoros, Mexico, across the […]
• Protecting America: Security and Human Rights 2007) After the 9/11 bombings of the World Trade Center, the US government under President Bush executed and implemented a series of actions that catapulted the country to a period of war.
• Refugee Women and Their Human Rights According to the researches have been made by UNHCR, 1998, found that 80% of the refugees immigrating to the United States and other countries of second asylum are women or children.
• Human Systems. Technology as a Human Right Since most of the world bodies continue to use the basic technology to communicate with the world e.g.about health and safety, access to these amodern’ basic technology should be regarded as a human right and […]
• Prisoners’ Human Rights Denial Human rights watch is required to create a standardized list of rights and guarantees that should affect both domestic and international institutions in order to ensure the application of basic human rights, such as the […]
• Global and Regional Human Rights Institutions Overall, the topic of human rights and their protection through economic sanctions and other strategies requires additional attention from the states and international institutions.
• Prisoners’ Basic Human Rights and Their Violation In the report, McKelvie et al.highlight the important contradictions behind the blanket ban, namely the lack of understanding behind the purpose of the prison, the influence of the media and the public press, as well […]
• Human Rights of Migrants by Francois Crepeau The report by Francois Crepeau addresses the deaths of migrants in the central Mediterranean Sea and evaluates the European Union border control analysis, migration policy, and the application of values and human rights in the […]
• Monsanto: Profits, Laws, and Human Rights Although the majority of multinational giants have affirmed their conviction in upholding the letter of the law and professional ethics, in practice, a good portion of them has issues with either the ethical or the […]
• Human Rights and Dignity: Non-Western Conceptions It has been accepted that human rights are the notion which was developed in the West, however, some scientists tried to contradict this idea presenting the arguments that many nations battled for human rights many […]
• Human Rights Issues During the Holiday Season Should we stick to the habitual “Merry Christmas” and stay loyal to the traditions of the majority or embrace a more neutral “Happy Holidays” and show respect to the cultural diversity?
• Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice It is essential to highlight the contributions of Ghonim because he was one of the first to leverage the use of social media.
• Human Rights of Poor in Developing Countries Their interactions with those in authority and the decision makers in the society have been marred with many obstacles and denied the rights to freedom of speech and expression that is being enjoyed by the […]
• Communication as a Human Right and Its Violations According to the international laws, every person has a range of rights which should be met in the society completely, and the right to communicate is one of the most significant ways for a person […]
• Human Rights and Relations in Education and Career The information is located on the left and above and is easy to navigate. This is useful to the employees as it makes them aware of the key needs to the job and the benefits.
• China’s Land Grabs and Human Rights Violation What interested you about the article and how is the content of the article related to aspects of global citizenship? Upon reading the news article from Amnesty International’s website about Chinese officials’ land grabbing […]
• The Human Rights and Its Basic Principles There is a perspective that the initiation of the given process can be justified by the need to protect citizens and the state.
• Human Rights in Naturalistic and Political Conceptions Conferring to one venerable explanation, the Naturalistic Conception of Human rights, human rights are the privileges and rights that we enjoy by the mere fact that we are humans.
• Human Rights, Education and Awareness But the progress is underway, and while there is still much to be done in terms of securing even the basic human rights, the strategies and the general principles of achieving equality can be outlined.
• History of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Things did not look too bright at the time: the condition of Japan after Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings; the divided Koreas; the beginning of the cold war between the Soviet Union and the U.
• Equality, Diversity and Human Rights in Healthcare Equity can be achieved in a health system that acknowledges the diversity of the population respecting the expectations and needs of the patients, the staff and the services as a whole.
• Syrian Crisis and Human Rights Instruments However, the increase in the number of migrants triggers a range of concerns for the states that they choose as the target location.
• Culture and Religion in Human Rights Universality Fagan asserts that a commitment to the universal legitimacy of human rights is not consistent with the dedication to the principle of respecting cultural diversity.
• Consequentialism and Human Rights Ethics is a moral code that governs the behavior or conduct of an activity.”Ethics is thus said to be the science of conduct”.
• The Evolution of Human Rights: France vs. America The Age of Enlightenment made human rights one of the major concerns of the world community, which led to the American and French Revolutions the turning points in the struggle for justice.
• Ethical Reasoning Theories and Human Rights Utilitarianism involves the assessment of the consequences of any action taken by the business since it involves a common good for the majority.
• Human Rights and Resistance of South Asia To get an in-depth understanding of the question and discuss it appropriately, we will refer to the status of women in South Asia where women’s rights are still discriminated in the light of social and […]
• The Issues of Human Rights The scope of this review starts from the history of Labour Human Rights and examines how various authors have presented their case studies regarding the effectiveness or lack of it of the policies that govern […]
• International Justice for Human Rights Violation In order to understand the status of these amendments, it is important to appreciate the relevance of the definition given in reference to acts and the crime of aggression.
• Human Rights and Climate Change Policy-Making Advocates of the inclusion of human rights feel that there is an important link between climate impacts and human rights and as such, integrating the two would promote the formulation of the best policies. Specifically, […]
• Just War in Human Rights Perspective When a war is about to begin, people, who start the war, have to understand the role of human rights in the process of making decisions and clearly identify the peculiarities of the just war.
• The Human Right to Privacy: Microsoft and the NSA Microsoft had started to collaborate with the NSA to help it to offer services to its customers, but as they progressed, the NSA began to access all the programs of the Microsoft that made private […]
• Economics and Human Rights: Intersecting Theories Theories allied to the two disciplines play a critical role in explaining development because human rights theories give economists an opportunity to employ legal and political concepts in the process of drafting policies aimed at […]
• Human Rights and Legal Framework in Poor Countries In this article, Benton traces the origin of international order to the 17th century. Moreover, Benton claims that the two approaches have been utilized to explain effect of imperial administration on trends in international law.
• Women’s Fight for Equal Human Rights According to the readings assigned, the term feminist could be used to refer to people who fought for the rights of women.
• Immigrants’ Human Rights in America: The Issue of Immigration as Old as the Country In order to make the constitution a living document, America should introduce effective measures in ensuring that the rights of all immigrants are fully recognized, secured and protected.
• The Human Right to Water: History, Meaning and Controversy The utilitarianism theory of ethics relates to the welfare rights and the libertarianism theory of ethics relates to the liberty rights.
• The Evolution of Human Rights in Canada In addition, the movements aided the treaties to champion for the acquisition of rights of associations and political developments among the indigenous communities living in Canada.
• Human Rights and Their Role in Public Opinion Making The quest for human rights create a mental picture that draws the audience’s assumed knowledge of the need to end the restrictions of human beings in their endeavor to reach out to greatness in life.
• Human Rights and Intervention in Public Opinion Making According to Bloomer, human rights demonstrate the public ideas that are used in the media and politics to ensure that they reflect the true meaning of the intended actions.
• Gender Studies: Queer Politics and Human Rights As earlier stated, the idea of queer politics came about to confront injustice and to ensure that the rights of the minority groups in the society are respected.
• Human Rights Issues in the Bahrain Members of the Sunni minority are the rulers of the monarchy; the present king is Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, and he has held the office since 1999.
• Conflict Over Human Rights The following discussion is a description concerning the conflicts between Iran and the United States in the promotion of human rights some violations of human rights by Iran, such as abuse of the captives.
• Human Rights in Relation to Catholic Theology The church declared the acts of slavery as infamy and conjured to discourage slavery since it was dishonored God and destroyed the lived of many people.
• The Ontario Human Rights Commission Application forms for job seekers and the process of interviewing applicants are usually subjected to all the mentioned elements of prejudice and discrimination.
• Torture and Human Rights However, the full state of affairs in Abu Ghraib prison came to the knowledge of the public when a report by the military into the first pictures leaked to an online magazine.
• Why Migration Cannot Be a Basic Human Right but Always Been a Part of Human Culture The United Nations has acknowledged the individual right of movement with Article 13-2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stating, “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return […]
• Human Rights Violations in Chile In order to confront past abuses and human rights violations, both civilian collaborators and the past military officers who took part in the violations have been taken through the prosecution process owing to the torture […]
• Human Rights in 21st Century: China Although there have been cases of human rights violations in China, recent events and efforts depict the country as working towards promoting individual rights.
• Faith, Justice, War – and Human Rights in the Realm of the Present-Day World Quran: The Most Ancient and Sacred Islamic Book as the Basis for the Laws on Human Rights Considering the Issue from a Different Perspective: The Fifteen Postulates Security of life and property: bi-al haqq and […]
• Ethical Relativism in Human Rights To support this point of view, the nature of human society, the standardization of human rights and the progress of human rights will be analyzed.
• Human Rights and NGOs In the world today, there are numerous international human rights treaties which stipulate the obligations of states, and the rights of the citizens in these states and beyond2.
• Human Rights Issues in Guantanamo Bay It is expressed in the article that although the detainees are international criminals, the move by the US to detain them at the Guantanamo Bay is an abuse of international laws on the human rights.
• The Human Rights Violation in the Republic of Korea The human rights situation under President Kim Jong-Un in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has remained dire due to the government’s unwillingness to yield to the recommendations by the United Nations Human Rights Council’s […]
• International Human Rights Law The civil and political rights preceded the origins of the economic, social, and cultural rights, and thus they are deemed as second-generation rights.
• Gender and Human Rights The concept of a Human of Rights introduced by Foucault in 1950s, and also referred to as humanity is traditionally defined as a “floating signifier” and is related directly to the idea of human rights.
• The Politics of International Human Rights Law To uphold the reliability of the country’s immigration programs, the policy requires three categories of immigrants to be subjected to compulsory incarceration.
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights UDHR is quite relevant to human service professionals in the field of domestic disputes. The assertions of UDHR’s article 25 are important to domestic dispute professionals.
• Turkey, Media and Human Rights According the report, “press freedom, freedom of opinion and expression and presumption of innocence should be exercised within the articles of the Constitution of the Republic of Turkey, Turkish Supreme Court decisions and judgments of […]
• Paul Farmer about the Human Rights As a result, Farmer argued that the current struggle for the essential and most vital human rights was to promote the social, as well as the economic rights of the poor individuals around the globe.
• “Feminism, Peace, Human Rights and Human Security” by Charlotte Bunch To help understand the concept of globalization, the author uses the scale, contradictions and the uncertainty associated with globalization. What are the alternative methods that can be applied to demonstrate globalization?
• The Objectives of Women in the International Community The need to increase the participation of women and the girl child in the civil society organisations must aim to strengthen women human rights.
• Human Rights Violations in Turkey It is due to this that the current strategy of the EU is to seek to advance human rights in Turkey in such a way that the most detrimental aspects of preventing the country from […]
• Human Rights of People With Intellectual Disabilities Since disability is not inability, human rights’ advocates argue that perception of people with disabilities as disabled is discriminative and therefore call for their recognition as a minority people with unique abilities that do not […]
• The Effect of Terrorism on Human Rights: The Clash Between the Human Rights Advocates and Victims of Terrorism Human Rights organizations have the responsibility to ensure that the governments and other counter terrorism officials respect the human rights and the law in their fight against terrorism.
• The European Human Rights System Despite the efforts of the European human rights system to establish a common system of legislation to guide the implementation of the human rights in all the member states, the specific laws of the states […]
• The Role of Non-state Actors in the Implementation and Monitoring of Human Rights Various human rights international and local organizations have come up with strategies that aid in the implementation of human rights laws and monitoring and evaluation of the standards.
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Human Rights and History

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Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Human Rights and History , Past & Present , Volume 232, Issue 1, August 2016, Pages 279–310, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtw013

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Historians are the embalmers of our political and moral convictions. As soon as historiography begins to take an interest in an issue, we can be certain that it no longer possesses a self-evident presence in our society. Some questions and problems only become objects of history after society has become historically conscious of them. The history of workers boomed in the 1970s, for example, when industrial labour was in the process of disappearing, just as memory and its sites became a mode of inquiry for historians in the 1980s precisely at the moment when lived memory of ‘the age of extremes’ (Eric Hobsbawm) was disappearing together with its last generation.

The issue of human rights has by no means come so far, even if a certain historicizing sobriety has now set in among activists. 1 On the contrary, as I have argued elsewhere, human rights are still something like the doxa of our times: those ideas and sentiments that are tacitly presumed to be self-evident truths and not in need of any justification. 2 Who is opposed to human rights today? And who of those born before the late twentieth century would like to be reminded that earlier he or she had had little use for the concept of human rights? At least in the Euro-Atlantic world today the resonance of human rights is so universal and unassailable that in principle the only thing still debated is how they can best be realized on a global scale. We feel distressed and melancholic about the continued violation of human rights in our time but do not wish to abandon the concept altogether.

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Human Rights and History

Responding to Philip Alston, Does the Past Matter? On the Origins of Human Rights , 126 Harv. L. Rev. 2043 (2013)

• Jenny S. Martinez

Response To:

• Does the Past Matter? On the Origins of Human Rights  by  Philip Alston
• See full issue

What is “international human rights,” does it have a history, and does that history matter? As Professor Philip Alston notes in his book review, Does the Past Matter?: On the Origins of Human Rights , these issues are the subject of considerable academic debate. 1

In my recent book, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law , I examine the role of international law in the end-ing of the transatlantic slave trade, and I suggest that this episode forms an important part of the history of international human rights law. 2 Alston’s thoughtful book review first examines the specific claims in my book, and then situates my argument in the larger con-text of the current historiography of international human rights. In Part I of this short response essay, I will first address the points of agreement and disagreement between myself and Alston about the specifics of the slave-trade history. In Part II, I will address the historiography more generally, and in particular claims made by those whom Alston calls the “revisionists” (most notably, Professor Samuel Moyn), who contend that the history of contemporary international human rights, properly defined, only began in the 1970s. I will conclude by offering my views on why this debate matters.

There are two aspects of the historical events I examine in The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law that I think significantly align this period with institutional characteristics of contemporary international human rights law: (1) the turn to international law; and (2) the involvement of a civil-society movement (employing many of the same tactics as modern human rights nongovernmental organizations) in pushing for that turn.

In my book, I argue that it was in connection with the slave trade that “[t]he idea that nations should use international lawmaking to protect the rights of individuals” who are not their own nationals “outside their own territory was first put into practice” through international legal structures. 3 The widespread adoption of treaties against the slave trade:

introduced into modern international legal discourse the idea that violations of human rights were offenses of concern to humankind generally, and not just matters between a people and their sovereign. This is the key conceptual step that separates the contemporary world of international human rights law from the ideas of natural and universal rights that arose during the Enlightenment and took national legal form in documents like the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man (which focus on the relationship between individuals and the sovereign states where they reside). 4

My argument is specifically a claim about the legal recognition of human rights as legitimate matters of international concern and the institutional mechanisms chosen to instantiate that concern; in that regard, as Alston notes, my definition of “international human rights” tracks the institutional details of contemporary practice. 5 Indeed, as the title of my book suggests, it is an argument about international human rights law.

Social movements are a part of the story, too, but importantly, they are tied to law. Abolitionism was a social movement that had as its goal a change in society. But the change abolitionists sought was also fundamentally a change in law: slavery and slave-trading were legal, and the abolitionists wanted them to be illegal. Were slaves chattel that could be legally bought and sold (and in whom other people had property rights), or were they people with civil rights like the rights to contract and sue for wages? It took quite a lot to change those laws — in the case of the United States, a civil war. A formal change in law would not have been enough if slavery persisted de facto (and indeed, it did and does in many parts of the world, and in the United States it took the civil rights movement to actually begin to eradicate the vestiges of slavery). But it is important not to forget that the goal of abolitionism in the nineteenth century was a redefinition of legal rights. Moreover, as my book recounts, abolitionists also sought changes in international law. A change in international law was as necessary to the global eradication of the slave trade as changes in laws were to slavery’s abolition domestically. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, slave trading was lawful — even encouraged — by international law; by the end, it was prohibited.

The first point of disagreement highlighted in Alston’s review is a definitional one: did the abolition of slavery have anything to do with “human rights” as we understand it today? As Alston notes, I contend that this was “the most successful episode ever in the history of international human rights law.” 6 I am hardly the first to have claimed the abolition movement as an early victory for human rights. Professor David Brion Davis, the pioneering historian of slavery and the slave trade, calls abolition the world’s “first successful if costly movement for human rights.” 7 Professor Seymour Drescher, another leading historian of the slave trade, describes abolitionism as “the first and, in a narrow sense, the most successful human rights movement.” 8 He has further written:

The real economic paradox of abolition is that in one major region after another — the British colonies, the American South, Cuba and Brazil — political power had to intervene to constrict or to abolish major slave systems whose economic advantages remained intact until well after the transformation of British abolitionism into a world human rights movement. 9 Many abolitionists relied upon, and contributed to the development of, ideas of rights. 10

Alston begins by questioning “whether there was in fact significant reliance upon concepts of rights” in abolitionism, and suggests that my arguments in support of this proposition are “almost anecdotal,” noting that a keyword search of a four hundred—page collection of pamphlets in the 1780s and 1790s reveals no references to the phrase “human rights” and just twenty-eight references to “rights.” 11 He then discounts the usefulness of this kind of “‘search engine’ mentality,” which he believes has led me unduly to discover and celebrate the fact that President Thomas Jefferson used the phrase “human rights” in introducing the measure banning the slave trade to the U.S. Congress in 1806. 12 As an initial matter, President Jefferson’s characterization of this landmark legislation, as he sent it to Congress, as involving “rights” is hardly an obscure or irrelevant citation that only a search engine could reveal. More generally, if I do not give a comprehensive review of every abolitionist source that frames antislavery in terms of “rights,” it is because there are so many — not so few — and because it has so long been established among historians in the field that Enlightenment ideas of rights played an important role in abolitionist thought. To be sure, ideas of “rights” were not the only thing motivating abolitionism. Alston chides me for too briefly asserting that “historians now . . . concur that British abolitionism arose out of a confluence of factors, including economic changes, Enlightenment philosophy, and religious revival movements.” 13 But while historians have disagreed about the relative weight to be given to these various factors for several decades now, and seem likely to continue to do so, it is fairly well established that arguments based on rights played some significant part in abolitionist discourse. 14

Alston suggests that there are distinctions among natural rights, the rights of man, and “human rights” as used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and today. 15 That is undoubtedly true. But just as true is the fact that there is not one universally accepted definition of “human rights” even today, and as Alston rightly concludes (in congruence with the claims of Professor Robin Blackburn, among many others), “there is a powerful argument to be made that there was a strong element of continuity in the evolution of rights discourse.” 16

Alston is also skeptical of my claim in the book that the description of the slave trade as a “crime against humanity” by nineteenth-century international lawyers, and the attempts to gain universal jurisdiction over the slave trade by redefining the slave trade as a form of piracy (because pirates were considered hostis humani generis , or enemies of all mankind) were at all significant. Alston suggests that “claims of continuity between today’s understanding of crimes against humanity and the historic practice of slavery have been consistently rejected in international law,” though he acknowledges in the next sentence that African governments have argued that slavery was, in fact, a crime against humanity that warrants reparations. 17 The fact that, given the passage of time, African governments may have phrased requests for reparations in terms of moral obligation hardly negates the possibility that they also view it as a legal wrong. Moreover, the fact that Western governments (for obvious economic and political reasons) have denied that any reparations are due does not negate the conceptual point. The significance of “crimes against humanity” in contemporary international law turns on two interrelated ideas: first, that these are crimes that in some way disregard and undermine the very humanity of the victims, and second, that they are offenses not just against the particular victim but that rightly arouse the concern of humanity generally, of the international community. These points are, as I explain in the book, precisely the arguments that were made for bringing slave trading under the jurisdiction of international law rather than leaving it solely up to individual nations to do as they saw fit.

Alston also critiques certain aspects of the causal argument I make in the book about the role of international law in the ending of the slave trade. He seems to think that I am arguing that international law was the primary causal factor in the ending of the slave trade, which would indeed fly in the face of most of the historical scholarship. I do not so much as disagree with Alston as think he has misread aspects of the causal argument I do make in the book. Far from arguing that international law — let alone international courts — independently caused the ending of the slave trade, I explore the social and economic forces that made ending the slave trade possible and desirable, and then explore how international law became one tool (along with military and economic pressure) in bringing about that legal and social change.

Here is the argument I make in my book in a nutshell. In the nineteenth century, civil society activists motivated by humanitarian concerns (of both religious and secular origin) that were sometimes phrased in terms of natural rights began to organize against the slave trade. 18 They gained sufficient political support that, as is well known, in 1807 the British parliament banned participation in the slave trade by British subjects. 19 After that, these abolitionists lobbied the British government to get other governments to ban the slave trade as well, since a unilateral ban would not do much good. Economic and political interests of various sorts (not all rooted in idealism) converged. For example, British slave plantation owners in the West Indies were concerned that their businesses would be hurt if French plantations continued to import new, cheap slaves and they could not. Once abolitionists had gained the upper hand in Parliament and secured legislation banning the importation of slaves into British colonies, the plantation owners wanted other countries to be stopped from slave trading as well. Based on these various domestic constituencies, the British government incorporated slave-trade abolition into its foreign policy. 20 The British government then persuaded (using a combination of bribes, threats, and moral argument) other governments to join a network of bilateral treaties banning the slave trade, and created international courts to enforce the treaties. 21 This moment was the first time a global network of treaties of this sort was created for humanitarian purposes (for protection of individual humans not on the basis that they were nationals of either contracting state party, but rather on the ground that what was being done to them should be done to no human), and the first time international courts were used to enforce such an international regime. It was a legal innovation, designed to achieve a foreign policy objective supported by domestic political constituencies with various motivations.

In this respect, the slave-trade treaty regime was the result of a social movement using many of the tools of advocacy common in international human rights activism today — petitions, speaking tours, boycotts, rallies, and so forth. For example, in 1814, three-quarters of a million people (out of a national population of twelve million in Britain) signed petitions in support of including a stronger anti-slave trade provision in the peace treaty with France. 22 The lead treaty negotiator for the British, the Duke of Wellington, commented in his correspondence on the “degree of frenzy” in London about the slave trade, noting that “[p]eople in general appear to think that it would suit the policy of this nation to go to war to put an end to that abominable traffic.” 23

I do not suggest that British antislavery efforts were motivated solely by altruism but instead acknowledge the complex interplay of political factions motivated by a variety of different concerns. 24 Anyone who advances the contrary position — that the entire British antislavery effort was motivated by imperial ambition and that more idealistic motives were not a factor in any significant actor’s decision-making — has a much tougher position to square with the historical record. 25 There are thousands of archival pages of private correspondence from ship captains, judges, Foreign Office officials, politicians, and abolitionist leaders expressing a moral repugnance towards the slave trade; it is conceivable that each individual was in the grips of false consciousness, and was actually subconsciously seeking to bolster Britain’s empire, but that seems implausible as a total explanation. To be sure, some people who supported the effort to suppress the slave trade were primarily motivated by money, power, and self interest — and as I say in the book, Britain would not have campaigned for abolition if it had been devastating to its economic and political interests 26 — but some were motivated by idealism. 27 As liberal international relations theorists have long noted, states’ actions in the international realm are usually the product of multiple domestic interest groups, which may act with different motivations.

Nor do I claim that the slave-trade treaties or courts played a primary causal role in the ending of the slave trade. 28 Instead, I suggest that they had an impact on the slave trade but also suffered from some significant constraints that limited their impact. To spell out the impact and weaknesses, I rely on both quantitative data (about the percentage of slave ships that ended up in one form of adjudication or another, and the use of various flags by ships in the trade, how these flags changed over time, and how they were temporally related to changes in the treaty regimes) and qualitative information from debates at the time (in the form of hundreds of pages of testimony before Parliament, in which participants in the treaty system testified) about whether the treaty system was working. 29 I acknowledge the many factors at play in the slave trade over the course of the nineteenth century, including economic changes. 30 To the extent that I posit a causal mechanism at all, I suggest that the existence of the treaties and the international norm against the slave trade was one factor altering the perception of the legitimacy of the slave trade and putting additional pressure for change on various national governments, which ultimately ended the trade by effectively enforcing domestic law bans on slave imports. 31

Moreover, I note that, like many international treaties, the slave-trade treaties were a means of solving coordination problems and the prisoner’s dilemma by creating a mechanism for commitment and cooperation. 32 I suppose it is possible that the treaties had no effect at all and that states could all independently have abandoned a lucrative practice like the transatlantic slave trade for their own reasons and without any coordination or mutual commitment, but rational choice theory suggests that possibility is unlikely. 33

I also suggest a darker relationship between law and society in noting that British military force was an important part of securing the enforcement of the treaties, and I acknowledge that (not without cause) many observers thought the whole scheme was a method of advancing British imperial interests. 34 And I note that the end of the transatlantic slave trade did not mean the end of slavery, or of slave trading in other forms and in other regions. 35 It is clear that those who were formerly enslaved and their descendants were not well treated far into the twentieth century.

If I say that the treaties played a “surprisingly central” role in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, I meant to put the emphasis on “surprising” because it is surprising that they played any role at all. One would be hard pressed to find a serious legal academic today who would argue that “law” unilaterally and independently “caused” a major social change. Take the American civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. The most relevance that law ekes out in the major accounts is something like this: Social, economic, and political factors in American society changed in the early twentieth century, which created the circumstances whereby African Americans’ equality claims became socially plausible. Additionally, the growth of a political elite and a broader social movement supporting some version of such equality set the stage for the Supreme Court to decide Brown v. Board of Education and subsequent cases. Together, this environment may (or may not) have galvanized political elites and popular social movement participants, which may have helped play a part in getting Congress to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, which may or may not have had a big impact on actual equality in our society. 36

If anything, my book tells an almost anodyne law-and-society story: social movements (in this case, abolitionism) impacted the law (in this case, international law), which in turn (along with economic, political, and other factors) eventually had some sort of impact on society (in this case, global society). The argument that the treaties against the slave trade had no impact whatsoever on the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade seems a much harder causal claim to make than that they did have some impact. The oceans were too vast to be thoroughly policed by the British navy (even at the peak of its naval dominance and imperial aspirations), and multiple nations had to cooperate to end the trade.

Nor do I disagree that other things Alston mentions, such as the American Revolution, the slave uprising in San Domingue in 1791, rebellions onboard slave ships, economics, 37 or imperialism, all may have played a role in the end of the slave trade (not to mention the American Civil War, which he does not highlight). 38 Alston places great weight on accounts that emphasize that the slave trade-abolition campaign advanced British imperial efforts. 39 But as Alston notes, “[n]one of this is to suggest that imperialist justifications, objectives, and means constitute the entire picture.” 40 Any kind of causal story that focuses solely on one aspect of society, economics, or ideology is likely to miss the multiple factors that converged in the ending of the slave trade. To claim that international law was a factor we should examine is not to claim that it was the only one.

But even if one wants to defend the claim that the treaties’ impact on the ultimate end of the transatlantic slave trade was so trivial as to be not worth attention, one still has to reckon with the fact that the courts that were created by the treaties freed 80,000 individual human beings from slavery. As Alston notes, and as I myself discuss in my book, many of these individual people ended up in conditions that weren’t much better than slavery, and 80,000 was a relatively insignificant fraction of the overall transatlantic trade. But, as my book explains, in certain critical years, either the international courts or the British courts operating under a theory of universal jurisdiction captured significant numbers of known slave trading voyages — thirty-nine percent in the peak year of 1835. 41 Indeed, one of the topics I explore is the ebb and flow of court cases in relation to political and military developments, and why holes in the legal regime meant that the courts were ultimately never successful in touching anything close to a majority of cases. And I spend an entire chapter of the book describing how those freed by the courts ended up in conditions not much better than slavery itself. 42

But in raw human terms, any international court, any international law that actually has some concrete and direct impact on 80,000 human beings — even if the impact is just being granted formal legal freedom at a moment when they were about to be sold in chattel slavery — is “surprisingly” effective, if only because the baseline assumption of nonlawyers is that law and courts have no effect at all. Many modern international courts — about which tens of thousands of pages have been written — have not had any similar direct impact. As of this writing, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has only convicted one person, after a decade of operation. Perhaps no one should pay attention to the ICC. But those who are, nevertheless, paying attention to the ICC might also want to pay attention to what factors made it possible for the slave-trade courts to grant legal freedom to 80,000 people — and, as I explore in my book, what factors stopped them from having an even greater impact. 43

Why should we care about the role of international law in the end of the slave trade? Perhaps historians of the slave trade might care a bit, but most of us are not historians of the slave trade. As I suggested in the preceding paragraph, my contention is that those who seek to design and use the tools of international law today may gain valuable insights about the relationship between international legal institutions, society, and political power by studying the interplay of these factors in the past.

Until recently, the conventional wisdom focused on the post-World War II period as the key moment at which “international human rights” as such became institutionally rooted in international discourse, through measures such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the U.N. Human Rights Commission, the Genocide Convention and the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. 44 More recent scholars have emphasized and explored roots further back in history, whether in ancient philosophical and religious traditions, 45 the Enlightenment, 46 the American and French revolutions, or specific developments in the nineteenth century. 47

While my book argues for careful consideration of the slave-trade episode as an element of the history, I do not significantly disagree with the large group of writers who treat other time periods as significant or relevant to contemporary human rights. In this respect, I do not disagree with Alston’s claim that human rights is “polycentric” and that multiple data points may be relevant to different aspects of the field. 48

Alston is correct, however, to highlight the importance of my disagreement with revisionist historians of human rights, most notably Moyn. As Alston notes, Moyn argues that human rights “emerged in the 1970s seemingly from nowhere,” 49 that earlier concepts that appear similar in certain respects to contemporary human rights are faux amis (or false cognates) to the current concept, and that those who argue that earlier events are relevant are at best misguided and at worst blinded by ideological devotion to human rights activism.

As Alston notes, part of the disagreement stems from the definitional assumptions “that inform the choice of criteria against which each author determines when human rights ‘began,’ or came to matter, or passed some other designated threshold.” 50 Moyn defines international human rights as “a set of global political norms providing the creed of a transnational social movement” 51 that involves as a central concept the detachment of rights from the nation-state. As Alston describes it, two claims are central to Moyn’s assertion: “(1) the norms need to be ‘global’ in the sense that they are not merely rights claimed by citizens against their own state but instead bypass or transcend the authority of the state; and (2) they need to be championed by a powerful transnational movement.” 52 I tackle these criteria in reverse order.

As Alston notes, the second prong of Moyn’s implicit criteria excludes many developments that others reasonably understand to form a part of the modern development of human rights — notably, the legal developments of the late 1940s — because a mass global social movement on the scale he demands did not emerge (and, as Alston points out, could not have emerged) until the 1970s. 53 I do not disagree with Moyn that the scale of the contemporary international human rights movement is significant, but I believe that it is nevertheless worth paying greater attention to earlier rights-focused transnational social movements (like the abolition movement and, as discussed below, the women’s suffrage movement) that, although smaller in scale and ambition, were in certain ways more similar to contemporary international nongovernmental human rights organizations than Moyn acknowledges.

In his book, Moyn dismisses the significance of both the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements of the nineteenth century. The women’s movement gets particularly short shrift: “Insofar as a generally rights-based movement like the women’s movement took on international form, its internationalism was about sharing techniques and building confidence for national agitation, not making the global forum itself a scene of invention or reform.” 54 This distinction seems unconvincing, since much of contemporary international human rights practice precisely involves “sharing techniques and building confidence for national agitation.” And, in any case, even if the early women’s rights movement (though involving international congresses and extensive correspondence between activists from many different countries 55 ) did not make use of the global forum in the way Moyn thinks relevant, abolitionism did make the “global forum” a “scene of invention or reform” through international treaty-making. For example, as noted above, mass petition drives urged the inclusion of a measure addressing the slave trade in peace treaties between Britain and France in 1814, 56 and the abolitionist movement continued to put pressure on the British government to persist in its efforts to end the slave trade for decades, as reflected in parliamentary hearings on the topic. The delegates at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention voted in favor of a proposal for dramatically expanding the jurisdiction of the slave-trade treaty courts, and the British government in turn drafted a treaty that would have done just that (although it could not persuade other countries to adopt it). 57 The tools of international law were not the only, or even the main, thing that abolitionists focused on, but international law was a recurrent aspect of the movement’s strategy for achieving global social change.

Moreover, the movement for the abolition of the slave trade and slavery involved transborder activism by nongovernmental, civil-society organizations that is linked in important ways to contemporary international activism. Later campaigns for reform in other areas — for example, the movement for women’s suffrage — grew directly out of the abolition effort, as activists who had learned organizing techniques in the context of abolitionism turned to other issues. As scholars have explained, “[t]he transnational antislavery campaign provided a ‘language of politics’ and organizational and tactical recipes for other transnational campaigns as well. The women’s suffrage campaign initially drew many of its activists and tactics from the antislavery movement.” 58 Antislavery was at “the vanguard of a new mode of collective action,” 59 in which organizers deployed “a new repertoire of public meetings, demonstrations, and special interest associations, while using newspapers to project their demands and presence onto a national and international stage.” 60

It would be one thing to dismiss the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements as entirely irrelevant if there were no connections at all between these movements and twentieth-century human rights-focused movements. But there were, in fact, links not only in the similarity of tactics, but in the continuous organizational life of certain nongovernmental organizations; 61 in the invocation of the memory of these past protest movements through, among other things, visual imagery and literary references; 62 and in their shared focus on individual rights (something that distinguishes these movements from other twentieth century transnational movements, like those tied to communism or decolonization). Particularly in the United States, campaigners for abolition were transformed into campaigners for women’s legal rights. As one abolitionist wrote, “in striving to strike [the slaves’] irons off, we found most surely that we were manacled ourselves.” 63 At the time, “[M]arried women could not own property, make contracts, bring suits, or sit on juries. They could be legally beaten by their husbands and were required at any moment to submit to their husbands’ sexual demands.” 64 The comparison between marriage and slavery was made by supporters of greater rights for women as early as the seventeenth century in France in novels and other literary works, and eventually was invoked in countries including Germany, Britain, and the United States. 65 As one scholar explains: The power of the slavery analogy, for feminists, was its insistence that women, and particularly women who married, were individuals in their own right, that they possessed “human rights” and free will and could not be legally disposed of like chattel or forced, even for family reasons, to do things against their will. 66

I also disagree with Moyn’s first implicit criteria with regard to the substance of “human rights.” Moyn asserts that a key substantive aspect of contemporary human rights is the severing of rights from the nation-state: “[T]he central event in human rights history is the recasting of rights as entitlements that might contradict the sovereign nation-state from above and outside rather than serve as its foundation.” 67 It is on this basis that he dismisses the works of historians like Professor Lynn Hunt and the rights talk of the Enlightenment and the American and French revolutions. 68 In this regard, I do not disagree with Moyn that one important difference between the contemporary conception of human rights and ideas of rights and the Enlightenment ideas of rights is the move from the nation-state to the international community as the guarantor of rights. 69 Unlike Moyn, I believe the slave-trade treaties made the leap to internationalism in a conceptually and legally significant way. 70

In this respect, Moyn’s definition does not closely track contemporary international human rights, which, as Alston notes, remains heavily focused in law and in practice today on the nation-state. 71 Human rights are defined in treaties that are ratified by nation-states, and those treaties impose obligations on states to protect and fulfill those rights. 72 States voluntarily consent by treaty to participate in supranational adjudication mechanisms (like the European Court of Human Rights) and it is national governments that remain responsible for implementing the decisions of those courts. Even as a mass social movement, a huge portion of human rights activism focuses on implementation and enforcement of human rights through national governments, which remain the only bodies truly capable of ensuring consistent compliance with human rights norms. To be sure, there are strands of contemporary human rights discourse that evoke the idea of naturalistic universal rights transcending the nation-state (for example, in the concept of jus cogens ), but they are far from dominant.

Why is it so important for Moyn to dismiss as irrelevant the abolition and women’s rights movements? Why not acknowledge that, while they certainly did not lead teleologically to the human rights movement of today, they had some influence on the way it has developed? Or, conversely, why would anyone persist in arguing (as I do) that they are relevant? In short, why does the history of human rights matter?

1. The Evolution of Ideas . — Moyn begins the first chapter of his book with a reference to Jorge Luis Borges’s essay on Franz Kafka. In the essay, Borges traces ways in which scraps of text from authors ancient and recent resemble Kafka. But, of course, no one would have seen this resemblance if there were no Kafka, which is Borges’s point. From this, Moyn concludes that “[i]f the past is read as preparation for a surprising recent event, both are distorted.” 73

In a certain sense, Moyn is taking aim at a straw man. No serious scholar subscribes to a narrative of inevitable progress, in which all the streams of the past converge in a mighty river of human rights triumphalism. Predestination has been out of fashion for a few centuries now. Only Martin Luther King Jr. could get away with saying that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice,” and even he suggested that it was an arc, not a line. Human progress seems quite contingent, unpredictable. Like Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths,” 74 human life unfolds through infinite forks in the road.

But at the same time, ideas do not come out of nowhere. The past gives us a vocabulary, and that vocabulary in turn shapes the very ways in which we think about problems. It would not have been possible for human rights to emerge as a global discourse in the 1970s if the language, ideas, laws, and organizing tools that served as the building blocks of the movement had not already been in existence in some form. As Alston describes it, Moyn’s theory is one of a Big Bang: from nothingness, matter. But the last Big Bang was more than thirteen billion years ago. Most of what humans do seems instead to be based on the remix method. Even Albert Einstein had to know about Newtonian physics in order to depart from it. Disco may have burst onto the world stage in the 1970s, but no one would have imagined its rhythms if they had not listened to jazz, swing, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll. 75 Kafka may have created his precursors, but he wouldn’t — couldn’t — have been Kafka if he had never read anything in the Western literary canon.

The idea of international human rights, like other human ideas, is a remix. Yes, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not have an immediate, measurable impact as soon as the U.N. General Assembly voted on it in 1948. But countries copied parts of it into their new constitutions. Activists in national struggles invoked it from time to time in the next decades. It provided a language for making claims against power, a language which certainly became more popular in the 1970s, but which could not have become the lingua franca it is today if it had been so unfamiliar, so novel that no one understood it. If the Universal Declaration did not exist, did not already have some cultural valence, it would not have been possible to convince the U.S.S.R. to agree to abide by the Declaration’s principles in the Helsinki Accords in 1977. And, reaching backwards, the Universal Declaration could hardly have been drafted as it was without the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man to riff off. And those documents surely could not have taken the form they did if Locke and Rousseau had never written a word. And so on and so forth.

2. The Use We Make of the Past . — Moyn casts himself as a neutral observer, turning a cool eye on the feverish writings of all the true-believing church historians. Moyn suggests that writers who contend that international human rights have a history prior to the 1970s have their vision distorted by their near-religious devotion to the cause of human rights:

Historians of human rights approach their subject, in spite of its novelty, the way church historians once approached theirs. They regard the basic cause — much as the church historian treated the Christian religion — as a saving truth, discovered rather than made in history. . . . Hagiography, for the sake of moral imitation of those who chase the flame, becomes the main genre. And the organizations that finally appear to institutionalize human rights are treated like the early church: a fledgling, but hopefully universal, community of believers struggling for good in a vale of tears. If the cause fails, it is because of evil; if it succeeds, it is not by accident but because the cause is just. These approaches provide the myths that the new movement wants or needs. 76

Moyn is not kind to those he views as quasi-religious zealots: “Much as Christianity was once attributed to Jesus rather than to the long-developing stages and politics of the institutionalization of his memory and teachings, the historiography of the 1940s teaches much about the substance of the Universal Declaration but nothing about why almost no one noticed it when it appeared (or if they learned of it, rejected its good news, much like Jesus’s own contemporaries).” 77 In Moyn’s view, Princeton politics professor Gary Bass is motivated by his early career as a journalist in the Balkans and “the desire to vindicate the model of moral engagement of [his] youth”; 78 Aryeh Neier’s recent book (on the precise period Moyn claims we should focus on) is dismissed because he is a “[m]ovement activist[]” whose writings can only be viewed as a primary source, not as an analytically useful study; 79 Hunt has invented a “creation myth”; 80 and I am described by Moyn as a “Stanford law professor who helped argue Rumsfeld v. Padilla before the Supreme Court,” 81 as if my ability to write a legal brief has irredeemably tainted my ability to read primary sources.

Perhaps some of us have been influenced by Justice Holmes’s warning that “it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived,” 82 but Moyn surely has a view on contemporary human rights just as much as anyone else. As Alston notes, there are deeper issues at work in the debate about the history of human rights: “There is a struggle for the soul of the human rights movement, and it is being waged in large part through the proxy of genealogy.” 83

For his part, Moyn seems clearly (if somewhat vaguely) taken with various aspects of the traditional left-wing critique of rights. How, he asks, “has international criminal justice ascended so quickly, and so high, even as social justice is increasingly marginalized, undermined from within at home and worsened through the victory of the free market on the world stage?” 84 He suggests that “[t]he rise of international criminal accountability has occurred alongside the eclipse of prior schemes of global justice, which promoted not retributive punishment but social renovation to achieve liberty and equality,” 85 and seems disenchanted with the ways in which “human rights inevitably became bound up with the power of the powerful.” 86 Moyn’s ambition is to extirpate the false roots of human rights, so that we will be free to imagine new utopias in its place. Moreover, Moyn predicts rather definitively that “[c]ontinuing geopolitical change will lead other ideologies and practices to seem more plausible for better or worse. These will take over the scale and salience that human rights have won, and they will do so rapidly and easily.” 87 Even us church historians do not claim that kind of ability to predict the future.

Moyn says of my book that “Martinez permits herself to dream for a moment when she suggests that her story might someday help us see that the powerless and poor of the world need our help just as the slaves once did.” 88 But it is Moyn who seems more occupied with dreaming of a vague future of alternative utopian visions.

Those of us who look before 1977 to understand international human rights actually have more modest ambitions than predicting the future. Rather, as I suggest in my book, “[t]he antislavery movement’s use of international law and legal institutions as part of a broader social, political, and military strategy can help us better understand the potential role of international law today,” and I highlight both the “limits” and “potential” of international law demonstrated by its role in the ending of the transatlantic slave trade. 89 There are, I suggest, concrete lessons for the legal institutions of today to be drawn from legal institutions of the past. There is a middle course between cynicism and naíveté, and it is in this space that progress is made.

Professor of Law and Warren Christopher Professor in the Practice of International Law and Diplomacy, Stanford Law School. Thanks to Robert Gordon, Daniel Ho, and Daniel Hulsebosch for their very helpful comments.

1 . See Philip Alston, Does the Past Matter?: On the Origins of Human Rights , 126 Harv. L. Rev. 1 (2013) (reviewing Jenny S. Martinez, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (2012)).

2 . See generally Martinez, supra note 1.

3 . Id. at 138.

4 . Id. at 149.

5 . See Alston, supra note 1, at 2071.

6 . Id. at 2044 (quoting Martinez, supra note 1, at 13) (internal quotation marks omitted).

7 . Gary J. Bass, The Old New Thing , New Republic (Oct. 20, 2010), http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/78542/the-old-new-thing-human-rights; see also David Brion Davis, Book Jacket to Seymour Drescher, Abolition (2009) (describing Drescher’s book as exploring “the world’s most important gains in human rights”). Numerous books and articles by historians contain similar language. See, e.g. , The Old South’s Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress 314 (L. Diane Barnes et al. eds. 2011) (“Slavery’s legal abolition stands as perhaps the greatest human rights achievement in world history . . . .”).

8 . Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery (1986).

9 . Id. at 5.

10 . Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights 485 (2011).

11 . Alston, supra note 1, at 2049.

13 . Id. at 2048 (quoting Martinez, supra note 1, at 17) (internal quotation marks omitted). I have a slightly longer section in my Yale Law Journal article than in the book on the origins of British abolitionism, see Jenny S. Martinez, Anti-Slavery Courts and the Dawn of International Human Rights Law , 117 Yale L.J. 550, 557-60 (2008), which cites sources debating the role of capitalism, the broader rise of humanitarianism in culture, the growth of religious thought, the motivations of participants in the popular abolitionist movement, and other factors. Except for those works that claim a kind of false consciousness — for example, that those talking about “rights” were really only concerned with bolstering their economic position — none of these considerations seem to negate the fact that the concept of rights played a role in how people thought and talked about abolition.

14 . See Blackburn, supra note 10, at 5. Alston also chides me for citing Davis’s now-quite-old work in support of the role of Enlightenment thought in the emergence of abolitionism, but Davis’s foundational survey of the history of western thought about slavery has been refined but hardly replaced by even his own later work. I would still direct a reader seeking an introduction to the discussion of slavery in Enlightenment thought and its absorption into abolitionist thinking to David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture 365-445 (1966).

15 . Alston, supra note 1, at 2051.

17 . Id. at 2050.

18 . See Martinez, supra note 1, at 16-20; see also Martinez, supra note 13, at 557-60, and sources cited therein.

19 . See Martinez, supra note 1, at 22-23.

20 . See Martinez, supra note 13, at 563-64.

21 . See Martinez, supra note 1, at 31-37.

22 . See id. at 28-29.

23 . Id. at 29 (emphasis omitted) (internal quotation marks omitted).

24 . See, e.g. , id. at 23 (noting that slave owners in the British West Indies had economic motivations to support slave-trade suppression after Britain banned the practice for its subjects); id. at 82-83 (describing extensive parliamentary debates by different factions about whether Britain should remove itself from treaties regarding the slave trade); id. at 169 (noting that realist international relations theorists are likely to “focus on the material self-interest of Britain” and “Britain’s use of its hegemonic military and economic power to achieve its goals”).

25 . See, e.g. , Samuel Moyn, Of Deserts & Promised Lands , Nation, Mar. 19, 2012, at 32, 32 (suggesting that my book “simply assum[es] that pure benevolence led [Britain] to establish the international courts” when, in fact, “[h]umanity provided the warrant for what one observer acidly called ‘war in disguise,’ when the policing of the seas was crucial, in an age of rival empires”).

26 . See Martinez, supra note 1, at 14.

27 . Moral ideals and more material interests may coincide or interact in complex ways. See generally Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (2006).

28 . Compare id. at 168 (“But the narrative recounted here at least suggests the possibility that it was no mere coincidence of social conditions in different countries . . . . Instead, at least some small role was played by international treaties and international courts themselves.”), with Alston, supra note 1, at 6.

29 . Martinez, supra note 1, at 78-98.

30 . Id. at 15 (arguing that we should look at “[t]he antislavery movement’s use of international law and legal institutions as part of a broader social, political, and military strategy”); id. at 146 (“Other factors in Cuba — including changes in attitudes, the increased domestic enforcement of anti-slave trade laws, a decline in sugar prices and a concomitant drop in the value of slaves, and the perception that the institution of slavery itself might be doomed — also played a significant role in the final suppression of the Cuban slave trade in the 1860s.”).

31 . Id. at 168 (“Changes in domestic attitudes were critical to the final suppression of the slave trade. The possibility that the universality of the antislavery treaty regime may have played some part in this shift in attitudes is at least worthy of further investigation.”).

32 . See id. at 169 (“Institutionalists will likely see the treaties and the court system they created as rational, utility-maximizing mechanisms for cooperation. In the absence of such mechanisms, even a state that wanted to abolish the slave trade would be tempted to defect to gain material advantage, but the regime created the opportunity for cooperation and thus mutual long-term gains for all participants.” (footnote omitted)).

33 . Slavery and slave trading were profitable. While idealistic abolitionists may have had political influence in some national governments, moneyed interests had influence as well. If Britain had unilaterally stopped trading in slaves, Portugal would have stood to profit that much more from allowing its merchants to continue to trade in slaves (and Britain would have stood at that much greater an economic disadvantage if Portugal had continued trading than if everyone had stopped at once). Once countries like Britain and the United States stopped allowing their ships to participate, slave trading interests in Spain, Portugal, and Brazil had that much more incentive to lobby for continuing the traffic. Even if both the Spanish government and Portuguese governments had agreed that, for humanitarian reasons, it would have been better for all concerned if the slave trade stopped, without a means of ensuring that the other country was not “cheating,” it would have been hard for either country to make the sacrifice unilaterally, knowing that a rival could gain economic advantage as a result of its decision.

34 . See, e.g. , Martinez, supra note 1, at 27 (noting that other countries “insinuated that Britain was not interested in the slave trade at all, but was simply using the humanitarian cause as a cover for its self-interested efforts to dominate maritime commerce”); id. at 46-55 (recounting America’s skepticism of British motivations and quoting John Quincy Adams’s diary description of British efforts as a “barefaced and impudent attempt of the British to obtain in time of peace that right of searching and seizing the ships of other nations which they so outrageously abused during war,” id. at 46 (quoting John Quincy Adams, 6 June 1817 , in 3 Memoirs of John Quincy Adams Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848, 557 (Charles Francis Adams ed., 1969)) (internal quotation marks omitted)); id. at 103 (“The Spanish viewed this proposal as a reflection of Britain’s insincerity in opposing the slave trade on humanitarian grounds and its secret desire to bolster the labor forces in its own colonies”); id. at 169-70 (“Postcolonialists might view the entire enterprise as a by-product of European desire to establish economically viable colonies in Africa.”); Martinez, supra note 9, at 559 (noting that some historians have argued “that the antislavery movement served to legitimate free labor, thereby reinforcing the interests of new capitalist elites in Britain”).

35 . See Martinez, supra note 1, at 13 (“To be sure, modern forms of forced labor remain a significant human rights issue affecting millions of people . . . .”).

36 . See, e.g. , Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality 6-7 (2004) (discussing disagreements among scholars about the importance of Supreme Court decisions with regard to civil rights).

37 . Compare Alston, supra note 1, at 2059 (suggesting the importance of debate about economic dimensions of abolitionism), with Martinez, supra note 9, at 558-59 (discussing debate about economic dimensions of abolitionism).

38 . See Alston, supra note 1, at 2059.

39 . See id. at 2060. I do, in fact, note in multiple places the ways in which Britain’s policies were perceived as tied to its imperial ambitions. See, e.g. , sources cited supra note 33.

40 . Alston, supra note 1, at 2060.

41 . Martinez, supra note 1, at 80.

42 . Moyn suggests that I “only grudgingly admit[] that slaves freed by abolitionist efforts, especially in Cuba, lived out their lives in penurious circumstances and often forced labor.” See Moyn, supra note 25, at 33. Chapter five of my book is entirely devoted to this topic. See Martinez, supra note 1, at 99-113.

43 . Alston also suggests that the accomplishment of the abolitionists was incomplete, since modern forms of slavery persist even today, and European powers engaged in extremely violent and even genocidal colonial practices even after they stopped the transatlantic slave trade. Alston, supra note 1, at 14. This suggestion is undoubtedly true, but if one is tempted to describe the end of the transatlantic slave trade as an utterly insignificant event, imagine the counterfactual: despite the many forms of injustice that persist today, would the world not be a less just place if slaves were still being shipped from Africa to America?

44 . See generally, e.g. , Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World (2005); From Nuremberg to the Hague (Philippe Sands ed., 2003); Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New (2001); Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights (3d. ed. 2011); Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell” (2002).

45 . See Alston, supra note 1, at 2063 & nn.87-89.

46 . See, e.g. , Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (2007).

47 . See, e.g. , Gary J. Bass, Freedom’s Battle (2008).

48 . See Alston, supra note 1, at 2078; see also id. at 2077-78.

49 . Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia 3 (2010).

50 . Alston, supra note 1, at 2071.

51 . Moyn, supra note 48, at 11.

52 . Alston, supra note 1, at 2072.

53 . Samuel Moyn, Substance, Scale, and Salience: The Recent Historiography of Human Rights , 8 Ann. Rev. L. & Soc. Sci. 123, 128 (2012) (suggesting that “no international human rights movement” of significant scale emerged in the 1940s).

54 . Moyn, supra note 48, at 39.

55 . Margaret E. Keck & Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders 53-56 (1998).

56 . See Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains 137, 230 (2005).

57 . Martinez, supra note 1, at 101.

58 . See Margaret Keck & Kathryn Sikkink, Historical Precursors to Modern Transnational Social Movements and Networks , in Globalizations and Social Movements 35, 37-38 (John A. Guidry et al. eds., 2000).

59 . Seymour Drescher, Women’s Mobilization in the Era of Slave Emancipation: Some Anglo-French Comparisons , in Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation 98, 112 (Kathryn Kish Sklar & James Brewer Stewart eds., 2007) [hereinafter Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery].

60 . Id. ; see also Elizabeth J. Clapp, Introduction , in Women, Dissent, and Anti-Slavery in Britain and America, 1790-1865, 16-17 (Elizabeth J. Clapp & Julie Roy Jeffrey eds., 2011); Kathryn Kish Sklar & James Brewer Stewart, Introduction , in Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery, supra note 58, at xi, xii.

61 . See Martinez, supra note 1, at 152.

62 . See, e.g. , Zoe Trodd, In Possession of Space: Abolitionist Memory and Spatial Transformation in Civil Rights Literature and Photography , in Representing Segregation 223, 223-43 (Brian Norman & Piper Kendrix Williams eds., 2010).

63 . David Brion Davis, Declaring Equality: Sisterhood and Slavery , in Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery, supra note 58, at 3, 11 (alteration in original) (emphasis omitted) (quoting Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings, 1830-1860, 122 (2000)) (internal quotation marks omitted).

65 . See Karen Offen, How (and Why) the Analogy of Marriage with Slavery Provided the Springboard for Women’s Rights Demands in France, 1640-1848 , in Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery, supra note 58, at 57, 59. See generally Bonnie S. Anderson, Frauenemancipation and Beyond: The Use of the Concept of Emancipation by Early European Feminists , in Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery, supra note 58, at 82.

66 . Offen, supra note 64, at 72-73.

67 . See Moyn, supra note 48, at 13 (2013).

68 . See id. at 22-29.

69 . See id. at 38.

70 . As I discuss in my book, earlier traditions in international law — for example, the writings of the Spanish scholastics that helped justify colonization on humanitarian-intervention grounds — contained traces of this idea, but the attempt to embody such concerns in treaties with concrete humanitarian objectives first emerged in connection with the slave trade in the nineteenth century. See Martinez, supra note 1, at 134—39.

71 . See Alston, supra note 1, at 2069-70.

72 . See, e.g. , Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Dec. 10, 1984, 1465 U.N.T.S. 85; American Convention on Human Rights, Nov. 22, 1969, 1144 U.N.T.S. 144; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Dec. 16 1966, 999 U.N.T.S. 171; International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Dec. 16 1966, 993 U.N.T.S. 3; Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, Apr. 11, 1950, 213 U.N.T.S. 221.

73 . Moyn, supra note 48, at 11.

74 . Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths , Ellery Queen’s Mystery Mag., Aug. 1948, 101 (Anthony Boucher trans.).

75 . Cf. Bass, supra note 7.

76 . Moyn, supra note 48, at 5-6.

77 . Moyn, supra note 52, at 128.

78 . Samuel Moyn, Spectacular Wrongs , Nation, Oct. 13, 2008, at 31, 35.

79 . Moyn, supra note 52, at 125.

80 . Samuel Moyn, On the Genealogy of Morals , Nation, Apr. 16, 2007, at 25, 31.

81 . Moyn, supra note 25, at 32.

82 . Oliver Wendell Holmes, Memorial Day (May 30, 1884), in The Occasional Speeches of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes 4, 6-7 (Mark DeWolfe Howe ed., 1962).

83 . Alston, supra note 1, at 2077.

84 . Moyn, supra note 25, at 32.

86 . Bass, supra note 7 (quoting Moyn).

87 . Moyn, supra note 52, at 137.

88 . Moyn, supra note 25, at 35.

89 . See Martinez, supra note 1, at 15.

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