Human Rights

The concept of human rights can be traced as far back in history as Ancient Greece and Rome and was particularly influenced by 17th- and 18th-century liberal thinkers whose ideas inspired the French and American Revolutions and the drafting of founding documents such as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Yet the modern understanding of human rights is very recent; it was with the creation of the United Nations (UN) in 1945 and the General Assembly’s ensuing adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 that human rights as we know them today began to feature in international parlance, conscience, and law. Human rights are internationally accepted norms that recognize that everyone has fundamental basic needs to ...