Essay on Human Rights

Essay on Human Rights

Notes for a history of human rights

Today it is common to talk about human rights and take for granted the promise that no matter where and when, fundamental rights violators will eventually be prosecuted and punished. However, a concept such as human rights did not always exist, or not at least in the same terms as it exists today, and that is why it is often considers that human rights are the result of a painful understanding of the history of suffering and tragedy that is typical of civilization human.

Human rights, according to Unicef, “are norms that recognize and protect the dignity of all human beings. These rights govern the way in which individuals live in society and relate to each other, as well as their relations with the State and the State's obligations towards them ”. They are fundamental rights that are acquired at birth by the simple fact of being human, and that are inalienable, inalienable, indivisible and universal. And from a historical point of view, they are heirs of the "natural rights" of antiquity.

There is, however, much debate about when and where human rights actually arose, or their earlier versions under different names. Different peoples of antiquity handled relatively similar notions of “human dignity”, although expressed in very different ways. For example, the Cyrus Cylinder, a cuneiform document belonging to Cyrus the Great (559-529 BC). C.), emperor of ancient Persia, contains the rudiments of a society based on certain natural rights, proper to people; and in the Kurukan Fugue o The Mandén Charter, constitution of the Mali Empire (1236-1670), established the federative government of the Mandinka tribes around the three fundamental principles: human life, Liberty individual and solidarity between people.

However, it was in Western societies that traditionally a higher emphasis in homework, where the idea of ​​"law" associated with these fundamental principles first arose. For this, without a doubt, the contribution of monotheisms was important, but especially Christianity, arisen within a classical society very advanced in terms of rights, as It was the Roman one.

Christianity abolished the division between noble demigods and the mortal vulgar, so entrenched in ancient times, and the replaced by the notion that we are all sinners before God and that it is his alone the task of judging our lives. It may seem like a small thing, but it was an immense advance in terms of equal rights: poor, rich, noble and commoners, all would face the same in the afterlife.

The birth of human rights

Perhaps that is why, despite so many important antecedents, "human rights" properly emerged in Western modernity. In that sense, the American Revolution of 1775 and the French Revolution 1789 were key historical events, not only because they demolished a social and political order in favor of a more liberal society egalitarian, but because they produced important declarations of principles that today we understand as declarations of rights humans.

The first of these declarations was the Virginia Bill of Rights, proclaimed in the Virginia Convention from 1776. East text, written by George Mason, was the one who inspired Thomas Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence of the United States, in which ideas of equality and the right to life typical of enlightened modernity are expressed.

Subsequently, the French National Constituent Assembly in 1789 approved the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, one of the central documents of the French Revolution, inspired by the Equals doctrine. The latter is considered the most important direct antecedent of current human rights.

Although both cases, the French and the American, are immense achievements in social and political matters, it was necessary to wait until the middle of the 20th century for the newly formed United Nations General Assembly to proclaim the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, on December 10, 1948. This act took place within the framework of the horrors experienced in Europe during the Second World War and it was an important gesture of advance towards the agreement of the peoples and the construction of a world in which, at the less, the notion that certain limits should not be crossed, or that they cannot be crossed, were universal with impunity.

Despite the bitter reality

At the beginning of the 21st century, we know that human rights are not universally respected and that in many places on the planet, in the first or third world, it is possible to find cases of eventual violations of these Rights. However, since the mid-20th century it has become increasingly difficult to carry out systematic human rights violations with impunity.

Several international tribunals have been convened on different occasions to judge events of various kinds, in which the law was violated. human dignity significantly, and the culprits have been tried and sentenced, regardless of the elapsed time of the events. For example, those responsible for the Srebrenica massacre during the Bosnian war (1992-1995), Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, were captured and tried by the International Criminal Court for the ex-Yugoslavia.

Thus, although the world is still far from being a fair place in terms of human rights, the very existence of these rights is already something known worldwide, and that is cause for joy. Impunity for human rights violations is the greatest opponent to overcome in these matters, and for this it is vital that the cases of violations be judged harshly, regardless of the time elapsed of the events: that is what it means that crimes against humanity never prescribe.

References:

• "Essay" in Wikipedia.
• "Human rights" in Wikipedia.
• "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights" in the United Nations (UN).
• "What are human rights?" on the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
• "What are human rights?" on Unicef.

What is an essay?

The test it's a literary genre, whose text is characterized by being written in prose and by addressing a specific topic freely, making use of the arguments and the author's appreciations, as well as the literary and poetic resources that make it possible to embellish the work and enhance its aesthetic features. It is considered a genre born in the European Renaissance, fruit, above all, from the pen of the French writer Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), and that over the centuries it has become the most used format to express ideas in a structured, didactic and formal.

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