HUMAN RIGHTS

The concept of human rights is that people have inherent rights simply because they are human. The ideas that developed during the Renaissance were that all men (but not generally at that stage, women or children) were equal. This was either for religious reasons, such as the Protestant view that as all men were created in God's image they must be equal, or because it was a fundamental principle in their secular humanist philosophy. They should therefore, be treated equally by the law. They, or according to many political philosophers, those with some degree of social standing, have the right to try to influence political decisions that affect them. Their personal lives and possessions should not be interfered with arbitrarily. These formulations are equivalent to the biomedical ethics, principles of justice, autonomy and non-maleficence respectively (see also Chapter 3).

It is possible to find references to some of the concepts that later became those of human rights in such documents as the Code of Hammurabi (1780 BCE) and Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics (330 BCE). One of the first legal instruments in the UK covering human rights issues was the Magna Carta (1215), in articles such as: