A thirteenth-century West African charter guaranteed the right to life
Centuries before Enlightenment philosophers wrote about natural rights, the Mali Empire's constitution, the Kouroukan Fouga, set out a right to life and to bodily integrity along with significant protections for women. Composed in the 1200s, it counts among the earliest charters of what we now call human rights.
Ancient societies had no universal notion of rights in the modern sense, but seeds existed. In the West, Jewish and Christian scriptures supplied ideas and Roman law offered legal machinery. The real forerunner was natural rights, born in medieval natural law. Augustine was among the first to ask which laws arise from wisdom and conscience rather than human whim, and whether anyone must obey an unjust law. In the 1500s and 1600s, scholars of the School of Salamanca such as Francisco Vitoria and Domingo de Soto described law as a moral power a person holds over their own.
England contributed charters. Magna Carta of 1215 shaped the common law and later documents including the 1689 English Bill of Rights, while Scotland's Claim of Right that year likewise outlawed abuses of government power. John Locke named life, liberty and estate as rights no social contract could surrender, and the American and French revolutions put such ideas into political language.
The phrase itself is fairly recent. Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill and Hegel stretched the idea toward universality, and in 1831 the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison urged readers of The Liberator to join the great cause of human rights. The term probably entered use somewhere between Paine's Rights of Man and that appeal.
The modern framework took shape after the Second World War in response to the Holocaust. Meeting in Paris in 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which went on to inspire many treaties and national laws. Rights are described as inherent and inalienable, spanning civil, political, economic, social and cultural spheres, from free speech to education. Debate continues over priorities and enforcement, and cultural relativists argue that individual rights may clash with communal traditions.
Source: Human rights
