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1 History
Shared heritage, common struggle
• Law and justice: the common heritage of humanity
• Respect for shared humanity in the major religious and philosophical traditions
• The place of the individual in the community and the rights of groups and peoples
• The common struggle for human rights
• Positive rights
• Natural rights
• The public policy function of human rights
• The contemporary role of international consensus and legislation
• Conclusion
Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
(Robert Kennedy, 19661)
This chapter looks at historical aspects of the development of human rights and at the global quest for their implementation and vindication. The following strands are discussed: the shared heritage of humanity in the development of the ideas of law and justice; major religions’ emphasis on respect for shared humanity; the place of the individual in the community and the rights of groups and peoples; philosophical debates that have accompanied the evolution of rights; the idea of the individual’s positive rights; the idea of natural rights; the role of struggle and policy in the development of rights; and the role of international consensus and legislation in the contemporary concept of rights captured in the UDHR’s opening article: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”2
Law and justice: the common heritage of humanity3
To understand and appreciate the contemporary concepts of law and rights, it is essential to have a sense of the common heritage of humanity in the development of these concepts (see Table 1.1). In Freedom in the Ancient World, the historian Herbert J. Muller noted that although ancient men scarcely believed that freedom and justice were one and inseparable as is now commonplace, “there has always been a real connection between them beginning with the necessity of law for any effective freedom. Law codes, written or unwritten, confer some rights in the very act of specifying obligations and penalties.”4
Table 1.1 The shared intellectual heritage of humanity in the development of ideas of law and justice
| BCE | |
4241 | First dated year in history |
3500–3001 | Earliest known writing, Sumerian cuneiform |
2500–2001 | The first libraries in Egypt; in Egyptian literature, lamentations and skepticism about meaning of life |
2000–1501 | Egyptian alphabet of 24 signs |
| Mesopotamian Codex Ur-Nammu |
| Babylonian Codex Lipit-Ishtar, Codex Eshnunna |
| Hammurabi, King of Babylon, sets laws of kingdom in order; Code of Hammurabi is first of all legal systems |
1500–1001 | Middle Assyrian laws |
| Hittite laws |
| Hymns of the Rigveda (Vedic religion assigns different powers to the separate deities of the heavens, the air, and the earth) |
| Gilgamesh epic |
| Moses receives the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai |
1000–901 | Pantheistic religion develops in India (Brahmanism and Atmanism) teaching identity of self, transmigration of soul; caste system |
| In China, rational philosophy gains over mysticism |
900–801 | Iliad and Odyssey; leather scrolls with translations of Old Babylonian texts into Aramaic and Greek |
| The earliest Jewish prophets |
800–601 | Laws of Lycurgus at Sparta |
| Indian Vedas completed (a collection of religious, philosophical, and educational writings). In India, Brahmanic religion defines six stages of the transmigration of the soul |
| First written laws of Athens by Draco |
| Anaximander of Miletus, Greek philosopher (611–546) |
| Zoroaster, founder of Persian religion (631–653) |
| Lao-tse, Chinese philosopher, b. 604 |
600–501 | Mayan civilization in Mexico |
| During the Babylonian Captivity of the Jews, many books of the Old Testament, based on word of mouth tradition, are first written down in Hebrew |
| Cyrus II, the Great of Persia (553–529) established Persian empire; in 536, he frees Jews from Babylonian captivity and aids their return to Israel |
| Solon’s laws promulgated in Athens |
| Anaximenes and Pythagoras, Greek philosophers |
| Mahavira Jina founds Jainism in India; first known rebel against caste system |
| Kung Fu-tse (Confucius), Chinese philosopher |
| Siddhartha Gautama, Buddha, founder of Buddhism |
| Xenophanes founds school of philosophy |
| Parmenides, Greek philosopher* |
500–451 | Neo-Babylonian Laws |
| Covenant Code |
| Deuteronomic code |
| Beginning of historical writing in Greece |
| Ramayana, ancient Hindu poem (c.500) |
| Empedocles and Protagoras, Greek philosophers |
| Herodotus, father of Greek history |
| Heraclitus, Greek philosopher |
| Socrates, Athenian philosopher (470 to 399) |
| Democritus, Greek philosopher |
| Ezra, Hebrew scribe, goes to Jerusalem to restore the laws of Moses (458) |
450–401 | The Decemvirs codify Roman laws in a form known as the Twelve Tables (450) |
| The Torah becomes the moral essence of the Jewish state |
| Plato (427–347) |
| Thucydides, Greek historian (424) |
400–351 | Aristotle, Greek philosopher (384–322) |
350–301 | The Indian epic, Mahabharata being written |
| 250–201 | Asoka, the Indian emperor, erects columns 40 feet high inscribed with his laws (c.250) |
| CE | |
401–450 | St Augustine’s City of God (411) |
529 | Justinian’s Code of Civil Laws |
570 | Mohammed, founder of Islam |
598 | Probably the first English school at Canterbury |
640 | Arabs find famous Alexandria library with 300,000 papyrus scrolls |
While these codes mainly imposed constraints, they also protected the individual against uncustomary or arbitrary constraints: “Early civilizations made positive advances towards such ideals in particular through the efforts of kings to protect ordinary men against the abuses of power and privilege.”5
Ancient Egypt, Muller assessed, foreshadowed democratic principles of justice when a god declared—in respect of the rights of the deceased—that he had made every man like his fellow man, made the great flood waters of the Nile for the benefit of the poor man and the great man alike, and given all men equal access to the kingdom of the dead. Even if Egypt never achieved this ideal of equality, “at least the next world was thrown open to common men.”6
The priests of the Middle Kingdom, scholars noted, were cognizant of the tendency toward recognizing the equality of all men. A declaration of the Sun God in the following excerpt from one of the “Coffin Texts” brought this out dramatically:
I made the four winds that every man might breathe thereof like his father in his time … I made the great inundation that the poor man might have rights therein like the great man … I made every man like his fellow. I did not command that they do evil, but it was their hearts that violated what I had said … I made their hearts to cease from forgetting the West in order that divine offerings might be given to the gods of the nomes … I brought into being the four gods from my sword, while men are the tears of my eyes.7
In Mesopotamia, the idea grew that justice was man’s right, not merely a royal favor, and that the gods themselves had approved this right. The ancient Sumerians were the first to formulate law codes; one of the earliest was that of Lipit-Ishtar, who ruled in the first half of the nineteenth century BCE.8 The code includes an invocation of the principle of justice: “If a man cut down a tree in the garden of (another) man, he shall pay one-half mina of silver.”9
The Code of Hammurabi, which is preserved on a large black stone, contains 282 clauses. It sought to protect the interests of the state and those who served it. The invocation of justice is at the very outset of the code. In the prologue, Hammurabi announced that the gods had sent “me, Hammurabi, the obedient, God-fearing prince to make manifest justice in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doer, that the strong harm not the weak.”10 Maintaining the principle of justice, th...
