Throughout the entire unit, I have been waiting for the concept of human rights to make its way through the surface. I had begun to question why this section’s theme was entitled Law AND Human Rights, when we had just been discussing law, for the most part, and neglecting the role of human rights in the progression of legal and human history. Why was human rights even included in this unit? I hadn’t really thought about it until I had just read the section on The French Revolution in the textbook, but I had noticed it and thought about it before. I had been trying to make somewhat whimsical and outlandish connections between legal and lawful events/ideas we have been coming up with previously in class and human rights/its relevance in history--but realistically, at the time in history/chronologically, human rights and the concept of them had not even risen yet! I never thought about the complexity and relevance of the concept of human rights itself, let alone when they come into play in history! It is fair to say that my perspective from how we live today in the United States of America, and how I’ve grown up with the rightful practices of this unique nation greatly effected the way that I thought about human rights as a whole. I feel that I merely assumed that human rights were an institution in society just like anything else was, like the law; i.e. if the law existed, so did human rights. Well, now I know that was entirely off. The idea of human rights germinated in 1789 (officially and most effectually)--that’s incredibly modern; 300 years ago! It was in the French Revolution in which the desperate need of restructuring the social, political, and religious organization was called for by the people as the abusive, irrational, and non-enlightened government instilled structures in their society which greatly opposed with the ideas of the Enlightenment and therefore the ideas/ideals of the people which the society made up of; sounded like a great time for a revolution (especially because of the instability and outside pressure coming in on the governing structures in France at the time). So, the Declaration of the Rights of Man was the revolutionary document which introduced and instituted the concept of human rights into society as the people of France saw it was necessary so lay out their undeniable and acclaimed rights to which must be respected and recognized. Such a basic and (seemingly) unquestionable notion, this changed the face of the French Revolution and for history as a whole (legality, mostly), revolutionizing almost everything about human history. Not only did it turn the Revolution all over, redefining what it meant to be a part of the French society, but it redefined what it meant to be human. And from there on, the concept and details of human rights kept on evolving as new events and other revolutions presented themselves. Human rights has developed so much from when they were initiated in 1789 as they needed to be inscribed on a piece of paper, as today, I could barely even recognize that human rights existed before 300 years ago, and the fact that there was a time where humans or groups of people did not even have or understand the concept of a right. That transformation has, for the first time, really shown me what it meant when earlier in the chapter, the concept of evolution of laws and rights and the progress throughout history was discussed. It really went full circle for me when reading the French Revolution passage because now, I am finally able to confidently and accurately make connections between laws, human rights, and history, not to mention answer the question of why human rights was included in this theme.
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