Human Rights, History of

In this article, six basic debates about human rights are clarified from a historical perspective: the origin of human rights as moral rights connected to the natural law doctrine and opposed to positive rights; the wave of criticism of their abstract and absolute character by nineteenth-century liberal, onservative, and socialist thinkers; their extension from the rights of man to the rights of all human beings and from individual rights to individual and group rights; the tension between national and international control over the protection of human rights and between domestic and international jurisdiction; the controversy over the indivisibility of the three generations of rights; and, finally, the problem of the universal or relative character of human rights as viewed from historical and anthropological angles. The article also tries to answer the questions of whether there has been more progress than failure in the field of human rights and of whether the pressure of inhumanity around us is necessary to trigger human rights progress.