The concept of rights based on equality, human dignity and mutual responsibility was present already in ancient Greek philosophy and in various religious codes of conduct, but it had gone through a long process of gradual modification before the idea of universal, inalienable and indivisible human rights was finally developed. This complex process includes various historical events and ideas of religious, political and economic origin, which proves that the concept of rights, though perceived in various ways, was not absent from the western thought in any epoch. The medieval holistic and christianized worldview comprehended the idea of men’s natural rights, which resulted in, inter alia, incorporating that idea into the canon law (and ecclesiastical courts), and in producing Magna Carta in 1215, which acknowledged that even a sovereign individual is not above the law. The man-oriented perspective of the renaissance philosophy and many of the Reformation’s postulates contributed saliently to the development of the idea of human rights: “in the course of the Reformation the modern sense of right had been established in a usage sufficiently general to include conservative as well as radical thinkers” (Vincent 1986, 24). In the seventeenth century the Dutch jurist, Hugo Grotious, expressed the idea that rights should be implemented in internationally recognized law, and late in the same century John Lock developed the idea of natural rights in his Second Treatise of Government (1690). A real breakthrough in the process of developing the notion of universal and inalienable rights of men took place in connection with the French revolution and thus the begotten Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen (1789). This document inspired and influenced the western political thought of the 18th and 19th century and undoubtedly contributed to the development of other documents and declarations important from the perspective of human rights and evolved the concept of the civil and political rights (so called 1st generation rights).
From more or less middle of the nineteenth century human rights issues started to occur in international politics, which is to be partly regarded as the result of a certain ‘westernization’ of international relations and an increased influence of liberal democratic Western states, which were, for a variety of reasons, far more supportive of human rights than for example authoritarian regimes or communist countries (Forsythe 2000, 32-33). In this period some sporadic actions on behalf of human rights were initiated and conducted: anti-slavery movement (Anti-Slavery Society in London), protection of the people employed in the industry (the International Labor Organization), action in support of the war wounded (the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva), and, of course, the activity of the League of Nations; but it had not been before World War II that human rights stopped to a sheer domain of a state and a matter of only national concern. At that time some significant actions were taken in order to put the idea of international protection and promotion of human rights in practice: a number of international and regional human rights institutions was established: the United Nations (1945) and the UN Commission on Human Rights (1946), just to mention the most prominent and best-known ones, and important documents and declarations, lately incorporated in domestic law of numerous states, were created: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the European Convention on Human Rights (1950), the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966), and a wide range of specific conventions on the 3rd and 4th generation of rights from the 1980s and 90s.
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