Human Rights in Western tradition, Normative Foundation of International Human Rights

When a court in Mumbai strikes down a law for violating Art.21, it is using a rule written in our Constitution. When the United Nations criticises a government for torture, which rule is it using, and who gave the UN the power to say so? The second question is harder, because no world government exists to pass laws. This topic has two parts: how the Western tradition of rights developed from ancient Greece to the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, and what international human-rights law rests on now that it is a global system rather than a European idea.

In two minutes

The Western tradition moved from natural law (Greek and Roman thought, Aquinas) through social-contract theory (Locke) and the Enlightenment to national declarations and nineteenth-century campaigns against slavery; international human rights law now rests on the UN Charter, treaties, custom, general principles, peremptory norms and, as a moral base, human dignity.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Human Rights Law on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.