HUMAN RIGHTS
Human rights, as they are understood by the modern Western world, took almost exactly one century to develop. The events responsible for formalizing the concept of human rights include the Glorious Revolution, which in 1688 brought King William and Queen Mary to the English throne; Thomas Jefferson’s writing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776; the passage of the U.S. Bill of Rights in 1789; and the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen by the French Constituent Assembly, also in 1789. Those one hundred and one years coincided with the Age of Enlightenment, a time when writers and philosophers such as John Locke and Voltaire began to argue for the primacy of reason, science, and “natural rights”—rights that all people are entitled to, that cannot be taken away by any king or government. Locke and others protested intolerance, censorship, dogmatism, and anything else that limited human growth and the acquisition of knowledge.
The universality of human rights, and the role of the West in formulating those rights, continues to be hotly debated. The state of human rights in the world today, and the best ways to guarantee those rights, are also of interest to countless scholars, politicians, and humanitarian organizations. In Human Rights: Opposing Viewpoints, the contributors explore human rights in the following chapters: How Should Human Rights Be Defined? What Is the State of Human Rights? What Should Be Done to Stop Human Rights Abuses? How Should the United States Respond to Crimes Against Humanity? In attempting to answer these questions, the authors illustrate that while human rights may have blossomed more than two centuries ago, the discussion about them has yet to wither.
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