Human Rights | Introduction
Human rights, as they are understood by the modern Western world, took almost exactly one century to develop. The events responsible for formalizing the concept of human rights include the Glorious Revolution, which in 1688 brought King William and Queen Mary to the English throne; Thomas Jefferson’s writing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776; the passage of the U.S. Bill of Rights in 1789; and the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen by the French Constituent Assembly, also in 1789. Those one hundred and one years coincided with the Age of Enlightenment, a time when writers and philosophers such as John Locke and Voltaire began to argue for the primacy of reason, science, and “natural rights”—rights that all people are entitled to, that cannot be taken away by any king or government. Locke and others protested intolerance, censorship, dogmatism, and anything else that limited human growth and the acquisition of knowledge.
That is not to say that the concept of human rights was nonexistent prior to 1688. For example, in 1215, the Magna Carta, signed by England’s King John at the behest of his barons, guaranteed nobles the right to a jury of their peers, limited the punishments for freedmen and merchants, and established the right of all free citizens to own and inherit property. In addition, the philosophy of humanism, which emphasized the goodness and dignity of humankind, blossomed during the Renaissance in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries.
The turning point in the ideation of human rights, however, was the Glorious (or Bloodless) Revolution, which ended the reign of King James II of England. Fearful of the Catholic king and the possibility that his Catholic son might inherit the throne, key political leaders beseeched the Dutch prince William of Orange and his wife, Mary, (King James’s Protestant daughter) to come to England. They arrived with an army in November 1688 and overthrew King James, who fled to France. The next year, the Parliament passed a Bill of Rights. Although flawed by modern standards—for example, the bill banned Roman Catholics from the throne—the document made it illegal for the British monarch to impose taxes without the consent of Parliament or to suspend laws. It also prohibited excessive fines, bails, and cruel and unusual punishments.
In 1690, the man who played arguably the greatest role in the development of human rights published his essay “Of Civil Government.” In that treatise, British philosopher John Locke declared, “The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule.” Locke also asserted that people are entitled to property and to the fruits of their labor. However, the philosopher argued that such liberties should not be accompanied by anarchy. Governments are necessary, but they are legitimate only through consent. According to Locke, the role of government is to ensure “the peace, safety, and public good of the people” while the role of citizens is to obey legitimate laws.
Locke’s views found an eager audience in the American colonies, particularly during the Revolutionary War. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote that because governments cannot rule without consent, citizens have the right to alter or abolish governments when their rights are ignored or restricted. According to Jefferson: “When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce [the people] under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.” Thirteen years later, on September 25, 1789, Congress passed the Bill of Rights, although the document did not become law until December 15, 1791, when Virginia ratified it. The rights listed in those ten amendments—freedom of speech, trial by jury, and protection against cruel and unusual punishment among them—are well known to most Americans, and they echo the values that had developed throughout the previous century. These rights also helped ensure that the goals set forth in the preamble to the constitution—“[to] promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”— would be met. As Fred Edwords, the editor of Humanist magazine, explains, “In their completeness, these amendments constitute a definitive compilation of the best judicial thinking on individual human rights from the preceding two hundred years.”
France’s overthrow of its monarchy followed on the heels of America’s revolution. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was adopted on August 26, 1789. The document’s authors stated: “Ignorance, disregard or contempt of the rights of man are the sole causes of public misfortunes and governmental corruption.” These rights included the presumption of innocence, freedom of speech and press, freedom of religious expression—as long as that expression did not disturb the public order—and the prohibition of government seizure of property without just cause or compensation.
The concept of modern human rights has continued to evolve since the Age of Enlightenment. In 1948, just three years after World War II and the Holocaust, the United Nations ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These universal rights include the right to live in freedom, without fear of torture or slavery, the right to participate in government, the right to work, and the right to education. This ever-expanding concept of human rights has led to the creation of countless human rights organizations whose aim is to monitor the state of human rights around the world and to prevent human rights abuses.
However, not every nation appreciates the work that these organizations do. Some countries do not believe in the universality of human rights or in the primacy of the Western view. Singapore diplomat Bilahari Kausikan observes, “The hard core of rights that is truly universal is smaller than the West [has] maintained.” Many people have argued that regional values must be taken into consideration and that Western Europe and North America are biased against the traditions of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Another con- cern is that the West emphasizes individual rights at the expense of national cohesion. Singapore ambassador Mark Hong contends: “In my view, the West may have overprivileged the individual to the point where the rights of society are undermined.”
The universality of human rights, and the role of the West in formulating those rights, continues to be hotly debated. The state of human rights in the world today, and the best ways to guarantee those rights, are also of interest to countless scholars, politicians, and humanitarian organizations. In Human Rights: Opposing Viewpoints, the contributors explore human rights in the following chapters: How Should Human Rights Be Defined? What Is the State of Human Rights? What Should Be Done to Stop Human Rights Abuses? How Should the United States Respond to Crimes Against Humanity? In attempting to answer these questions, the authors illustrate that while human rights may have blossomed more than two centuries ago, the discussion about them has yet to wither.
