III-a. Historical Foundations

For much of human history, individuals had no recognized rights. It was accepted that the power of emperors and kings was absolute, at least with respect to secular issues. In time it was argued that, in recognition of the interests of the monarch’s subjects, the powers of the sovereign ought to be limited. The claims of these countervailing interests were articulated in the Magna Carta, arguably the first major rights document. This "great charter" was drawn up by barons and churchmen in England who forced the tyrannical King John to affix his seal to it at a meadow along the Thames, called Runnymede, on June 15, 1215. It was based on the Charter of Liberties issued by Henry I more than a hundred years earlier. Like many later rights documents, the Magna Carta was not fully implemented. Indeed, John recruited a new army and sought to destroy the barons who had forced it on him. Nevertheless, the document broke new ground by declaring that despotism was illegitimate, and rights of citizens were to be recognized and respected. These were radical ideas.

The modern nation-state system had its beginnings in the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. Its core principles were that states were sovereign in that they had no ruling bodies above them, and no state was permitted to interfere in the internal affairs of any other. Within states, people lived at the mercy of their rulers, their sovereigns. The Magna Carta represented constraint on the sovereign from within the sovereign’s jurisdiction. Sovereigns were not constrained from without. International law did not apply to individuals but only to states. There was no international protection for the rights of individuals at all.

In 1776 the Declaration of Independence, marking the revolution of the colonies against the tyranny of King George, launched another major human rights movement. It was consolidated in the Bill of Rights, added in 1791 to the United States Constitution of 1787. These first ten amendments spelled out the basic rights of citizens of the new United States.

The French revolution led to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, approved by the new French National Assembly on August 4, 1789.

These efforts advanced the cause of rights within particular nations, but were not bases for international agreement or action. Thus they were not about human rights as that term is now understood.  As explained in Section VI-a, by definition the term human rights is understood to refer to those rights that are universal, enjoyed by all persons by virtue of their being human. On this basis, rights recognized only in one country cannot be viewed as human rights.

Human rights, understood as claims for universal recognition of rights, arguably began with the anti-slavery movement in the 19th century. It culminated in the signing at Brussels in 1890 of a multilateral treaty prohibiting the international slave trade. The Anti-Slavery Society, now Anti-Slavery International, headquartered in London, is the oldest human rights organization in the world.

Early in the twentieth century, labor rights came to be recognized, partly to resist the growing attractiveness of Marxism. The International Labour Organisation was created soon after World War I, and helped to create a number of international agreements for the protection of workers.

The modern era of human rights began with the signing of the Charter of the United Nations in 1945 and the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN General Assembly in 1948, as discussed in Subsection III-c.

A good chronology of developments in the field of human rights since World War II may be found on the website of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, at http://www.unhchr.ch/chrono.htm

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Subsection III-a last updated on September 05, 1999