What is a Human
Right?
Dictionary Definition
The basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled, often
held to include the right to life and liberty, freedom of thought and
expression, and equality before the law.
Encyclopedic Definition
Human Rights, universal rights held to belong to individuals by
virtue of their being human, encompassing civil, political, economic,
social, and cultural rights and freedoms, and based on the notion of
personal human dignity and worth. Conceptually derived from the theory
of natural law and originating in Greco-Roman doctrines, the idea of
human rights appears in some early Christian writers' works and is
reflected in the Magna Carta (1215). The concept winds as a
philosophical thread through 17th- and 18th-century European and
American thought, including the Declaration of Independence (1776) and
the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789). The
United Nation's Commission on Human Rights, with Eleanor Roosevelt as
chair, created the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948),
which reasserted the concept of human rights after the horrors of World
War II. Human rights have since become a universally espoused yet
widely disregarded concept.
Organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch
promote human rights and denounce human-rights abuses. In addition,
such abuses around the world are monitored and documented by
independent investigators (“special rapporteurs”) appointed by the UN
Human Rights Commission, which, in turn, rebukes cited nations for
their human-rights failures. The charging in 1998 by a Spanish court of
former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet with human-rights violations
and the 1999 British ruling that he could be extradited to Spain, as
well as the indictment and arrest (2000) in Senegal of former Chadian
president Hissène Habré for human-rights violations during his
presidency (although charges were later dropped), were regarded as
steps forward in the international protection of human rights.
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