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Human Rights: A Brief History Courtesy: http://library.thinkquest.org/C0126065/hrhistory.html?tqskip1=1 Human rights is a concept that has been constantly evolving throughout human history. They been intricately tied to the laws, customs and religions throughout the ages. One of the first examples of a codification of laws that contain references to individual rights is the tablet of Hammurabi. The tablet was created by the Sumerian king Hammurabi about 4000 years ago. While considered barbaric by today's standards, the system of 282 laws created a precedent for a legal system . This kind of precedent and legally binding document protects the people from arbitrary persecution and punishment. The problems with Hammurabi's code were mostly due to its cause and effect nature, it held no protection on more abstract ideas such as race, religion, beliefs, and individual freedoms. It was in ancient Greece where the concept of human rights began to take a greater meaning than the prevention of arbitrary persecution. Human rights became synonymous with natural rights, rights that spring from natural law . According to the Greek tradition of Socrates and Plato, natural law is law that reflects the natural order of the universe, essentially the will of the gods who control nature. A classic example of this occurs in Greek literature, when Creon reproaches Antigone for defying his command to not bury her dead brother, and she replies that she acted under the laws of the gods. This idea of natural rights continued in ancient Rome, where the Roman jurist Ulpian believed that natural rights belonged to every person, whether they were a Roman citizen or not. Despite this principle, there are fundamental differences between human rights today and natural rights of the past. For example, it was see as perfectly natural to keep slaves, and such a practice goes counter to the ideas of freedom and equality that we associate with human rights today. In the middle ages and later the renaissance, the decline in power of the church led society to place more of an emphasis on the individual, which in turn caused the shift away from feudal and monarchist societies, letting individual expression flourish. The next fundamental philosophy of human rights arose from the idea of positive law. Thomas Hobbes, (1588-1679) saw natural law as being very vague and hollow and too open to vast differences of interpretation . Therefore under positive law, instead of human rights being absolute, they can be given, taken away, and modified by a society to suit its needs. Jeremy Bentham, another legal positivist sums up the essence of the positivist view: Right is a child of law; from real laws come real rights, but from imaginary law, from "laws of nature," come imaginary rights….Natural rights is simple nonsense. (J.Bentham, Anarchichical Follies, quotes in N.Kinsella, "Tomorrow's Rights in the Mirror of History" in G. Gall, ed., Civil Liberties in Canada (Toronto:Butterworths, 1982), p.17.) This transfer of abstract ideas regarding human rights and their relation to the will of nature into concrete laws is exemplified best by various legal documents that specifically described these rights in detail: |
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