1789 - Human Rights, Social Justice

Human Rights, Social Justice

The Declaration of the Rights of Man adopted by the French assembly declares that man has "natural and imprescribable rights. These rights are liberty, property, personal security, and resistance to oppression." "No one may be accused, imprisoned, or held under arrest except in such cases and in such a way as is prescribed by law." "Every man is presumed innocent until he is proved guilty." "Free expression of thought and opinion is one of the most precious rights of mankind: every citizen may therefore speak, write, and publish freely." "Since the ownership of property is a sacred and inviolable right, no person may be deprived of his property except with legal sanction and in the public interest, after a just indemnity has been paid."

Planters in Saint Domingue on Hispaniola send delegates to the National Assembly in Paris demanding a free hand to deal with the colony's affairs. Saint Domingue (later Haiti) has 480,000 slaves and is the envy of the Caribbean, but the revolutionists at Paris are not sympathetic to the slave-owning pressure group (see 1791).

Slaves on the French Caribbean island of Martinique rise up against their owners, but troops suppress the rebellion.

Jamaica has 211,000 slaves, up from 40,000 a century ago. Britain's House of Commons hears from William Wilberforce that one third of the African slaves landed in the West Indies die within a few months of arrival, many of them by suicide (see 1787; 1791).

Japan bans streetwalkers and requires prostitutes at Edo to move into the Yoshiwara section established in 1617. Some 2,000 move into the area within a few days (mixed bathing is also prohibited, and public bathhouses separate men from women).

The Judiciary Act signed by President Washington September 24 includes an Alien Tort Claims Act asserting that federal "district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States." Intended in part to help recover property taken by pirates, the law will be used more than 200 years hence as the basis for lawsuits against companies and individuals, foreign and domestic, charged with human rights abuses.