Human Rights – What They Are, and How They Emerged

By Aeneas • on January 23, 2012

The following video shows that people generally do not know much about human rights but just accept them as given. Of course this is very worrying because if people do not know what they are they can be more easily taken away. Human rights were created, often at great human cost and should not be taken for granted or given away easily.

It also talks about how human rights emerged, starting with a reference to Cyrus the Great of Persia (ironically today’s Iran) who freed the slaves of Babylon and allowed freedom of religion. It goes on to refer to Roman ‘natural law’, Magna Carta, the American Declaration of Independence, the protests of Ghandi, and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. It goes on to pose the question of why there are people who still do not enjoy human rights.

The Cairo Declaration and the efforts of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) are actively undermining the concept of human rights. If human rights are subject to sharia then they are no longer universal. If the ‘Istanbul Process’ results in the adoption of United Nations Resolution 16/18 then human rights have effectively been replaced by sharia law.