HUMAN RIGHTS
Uploaded by hiepsymu on Jun 25, 2006
HUMAN RIGHTS
Thoi nguyen
That due a person or claim a person has by virtue of being a human being. The term human rights is relatively recent. It was first used by U. S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a 1941 message to the United States' Congress in which he propounded four freedoms- - -freedoms of speech and religion, and freedoms from want and fear. The idea of human rights is an elaboration of what used to be called natural rights or the rights of man.
These are a particularly Western idea that grew out of the medieval concern for the rights of specific groups, such as lords, barons, churchmen, kings, guilds, or towns. With the Enlightenment, philosophers began to consider whether people in general had any rights. John Locke in particular argued in his influential second Treatise of Government (1690) that all people have a natural right to freedom, equality, and property. He directly influenced the American Declaration of Independence, which almost a century later (1776) declared that "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." During the French Revolution the French National Assembly approved the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), which proclaimed that the goal of political association is the preservation of the natural and inalienable rights of man, of liberty, private property, personal security, and resistance to oppression.
Such rights were further defined in the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States, among them the freedom of speech, religion, and assembly. These and other rights have been included in many other constitutions and now are part of an International Bill of Rights. This comprises the 1945 United Nations Charter (Articles 1 and 55), the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) adopted by the UN General Assembly, and the two international covenants passed by the General Assembly in 1966, one on Civil and Political Rights (CPR) and the other on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ESCR). There is now a UN Human Rights Commission that can investigate alleged violations of human rights and also receive and consider individual complaints, a momentous advance for human rights in the state-centered international system. And there is the Helsinki process that began with the...