Civil rights began as the privileges of a Roman citizen
The phrase civil rights translates the Latin for the rights of the citizen. In Rome even enslaved citizens had some legal standing. Two thousand years later, the same idea travelled through an English bill of 1689 and a Virginia declaration into the heart of international human rights law.
Civil and political rights shield individuals from interference by governments, organisations and other people, and guarantee a say in public life. The civil side covers bodily and mental integrity, safety, privacy, freedom from discrimination, and liberty of thought, speech, religion, press, assembly and movement. The political side includes fair trials, due process and legal remedies, alongside the freedoms to associate, petition and vote.
Rome's record was mixed. The Edict of Milan in 313 brought religious freedom, but in 380 the Edict of Thessalonica required every subject to profess Nicene Christianity. Roman legal doctrine faded in the Middle Ages, yet universal claims could still rest on Christian teaching: the leaders of Kett's Rebellion in 1549 declared that God had made all people free. In the seventeenth century the judge Sir Edward Coke argued that Englishmen had long held rights by birth. Parliament passed the English Bill of Rights in 1689, which George Mason and James Madison drew on for the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776, itself a heavy influence on the US Bill of Rights of 1789.
Meanings shifted with each era. When legislation strips away a right, the result is a civil disability, and in early nineteenth-century Britain civil rights mostly meant the legal discrimination facing Catholics, which the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829 ended. In the United States the term became bound up with the movement of 1954 to 1968 against segregation and Jim Crow laws, fought in streets, legislatures and the Supreme Court.
These rights make up the original core of international human rights, filling the first part of the 1948 Universal Declaration and later the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Theorists call them first-generation, or largely negative, rights, and the sociologist T. H. Marshall observed that civil rights were codified before political ones, which in turn preceded social rights. Courts can also recognise unwritten rights, as with privacy in the United States.
Source: Civil and political rights
