The rationalistic doctrine of natural law asserted that human beings were born free and equal in rights but that in the state of nature these natural rights lacked protection. According to the theory of the social contract, human beings decided to create States mainly for the purpose of protecting their natural and inalienable human rights. These concepts are central to some of the most important works of John Locke, Thomas Paine, Samuel Pufendorf, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and other philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whose writings can be seen reflected in the constitutional documents that emerged from the American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century. Locke, for example, asserted that ‘the great and chief end … of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property – that is, their lives, liberties and estates’ (Locke 1977, 180). This same notion is expressed almost verbatim in the United States Declaration of Independence of 1776:

The core notions of this ‘first generation’ of human rights were subsequently elaborated in so-called bills of rights, which were either included in or attached to the constitutions of States. These early catalogues of human rights, which were referred to as ‘civil and political rights’, were inspired by the ideas of liberalism, democracy, and the fight against feudalism, the power of the Catholic Church, and other outdated and autocratic structures and regimes that still held hegemonic authority throughout much of Europe. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the development of human rights in Europe was driven by bourgeois revolutions and was closely related to the development of democracy, constitutionalism, and the rule of law. With the rise of capitalism in the age of industrialization, the so-called civil and political rights, especially the right to property, came to be strongly criticized by Karl Marx and other socialist philosophers as egoistic and as pertaining exclusively to the bourgeoisie.² These thinkers demanded factual equality in all spheres of life, including social and economic life, as well as the extension of human rights to all individuals, particularly the working classes. Thus, starting with the Russian Revolution of 1917, a ‘second generation’ of economic, social, and cultural rights gradually came to be included in the constitutions of a number of States, some of them avowedly socialist, which was in some ways the antithesis of the classical Western concept of civil and political rights.

Up until the end of World War II, human rights had been codified exclusively in national constitutions, as they were not considered a legitimate concern of the international community. This attitude changed profoundly due to the unspeakable human rights violations committed during the Holocaust. In 1945 the United Nations was established with three major aims and objectives: international peace and security, economic and social development, and the promotion of human rights. The term ‘human rights’ is used in several places in the Charter of the United Nations, but it is not defined therein. This task was delegated to the newly created Human Rights Commission, which was requested to draft an International Bill of Rights. This was a difficult task, considering the fundamentally different approaches that characterized Western and socialist concepts of human rights. Nevertheless, on 10 December 1948 the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which represents a synthesis in that it contains both generations of human rights in a single document. The subsequent drafting of a legally binding universal human rights convention, however, turned out to be even more difficult, as the Cold War had begun in earnest and Western powers insisted that two different treaties needed to be drafted to reflect the differences between the two generations. Finally, on 16 December 1966 the UN General Assembly unanimously adopted both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The Western and socialist covenants share a number of common principles, such as the right of all peoples to self-determination (Article 1), which is a cornerstone of the so-called ‘third generation’ of human rights and one that reflects growing recognition of the needs and rights of the Global South. Subsequently other UN human rights treaties, most notably the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1979)³ and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989),⁴ were ratified and thereby accepted as legally binding by almost all States throughout the world.⁵ Then, in 1993, after the end of the Cold War, the United Nations convened a World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, at which all member States agreed on the universality, indivisibility, equality, and interdependence of all human rights, thereby putting an end to the ideological debates and distinctions concerning the various generations.⁶

Since the founding of the United Nations, regional organizations, such as the Council of Europe, the Organization of American States, the African Union, and the League of Arab States, have also adopted a variety of human rights instruments. These documents bear a close resemblance to the UN instruments, but they also reflect regional differences and peculiarities. Thus, whereas the European Convention on Human Rights of 1950 and the American Convention on Human Rights of 1969 for the most part echo the key concepts of the Western or first-generation civil and political rights, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights of 1981 contains the most important human rights of all three generations, including the most comprehensive list to date of the collective rights of peoples.

By ratifying an international or regional human rights treaty, States voluntarily accept a legal obligation towards all other State parties to respect, protect, and fulfil all human rights recognized therein. This obligation can be broken down as follows:

The most important existential right is the right to life, which means that the State and its organs shall not arbitrarily kill individuals (e.g. by summary execution, such as occurs under military dictatorships) and shall protect the lives of human beings against organized crime, preventable...