Origins

In this course,

what we're going to be looking at is the international human

rights law, its origins and modern day practice.

We'll be looking at international human rights law

from a top down perspective looking at the legal system

internationally and how it protects the rights of individuals.

International human rights law comes from a number of

different places.

At its core is the idea that everyone has a certain sets of

rights regardless of their nationality or origins.

As law, this is a somewhat complicated proposition.

International law for example regulates certain interactions

between states and it could be very good at say demarcating a

boundary or regulating agreements between states in

say trade or other matters.

But it's somewhat more complicated a proposition in

international law when it comes to the protection of human rights.

As one human rights scholar famously put in.

Norway isn't really affected if Turkey tortures one of its citizens.

Norway is very effective if Turkey reneges on a trade deal.

This compote this illustrates the dilemma that international

rights law sometimes has. It makes a subject

of the law, not countries, but the individuals living

in another state.

This means that international human rights law can approach

some degree of complexity and problems in order to protect individuals.

Furthermore,

the idea of human rights law is one that's rooted in a western

philosophical tradition.

The rights of man were associated with the American

revolution in seventeen seventy five.

And also with the French revolution in seventeen ninety three.

The Rights of Man was the title of a seventeen ninety one book

by the philosopher Thomas Payne,

who maintained that human rights were natural and

originated in human nature.

However, human rights,

as were being discussed at the end of the eighteenth century,

were rights very much for western

white men and very often wealthy men with the often the

exclusion of those living in other countries.

Outside of Europe and also to women from their scope.

International law in the eighteenth century primarily

existed to control the interactions of countries with one another.

When treaties were agreed and signed between different countries,

These were of the form of more personal agreements or personal

contracts between monarchs,

and it was common for some treaties to expire

when a king or queen died.

It was only with the more organized

system of international law that started to evolve at the

end of the eighteenth century and certainly after the end of

the Napoleonic wars,

but there were permanently binding international treaties created.

This was significant in doing things that became the

foundations of modern international human rights law,

For example, the end of the slave trade

in part came about because of an eighteen forty two treaty

between twenty six different European countries and South

American states,

which was then followed up by the general act of the Brussels

Conference in eighteen ninety on the suppression of slavery.

All of this end to end the slave trade, but crucially did

not give rights to the individual peoples who were the

victims of slavery.

Another area where international human rights law

started to come into being is what is now called

international humanitarian law governing the conduct of armed hostilities.

The Hague Convention of eighteen ninety nine,

as well as dealing with the conduct of wars,

also to its contained rights,

such as rights concerning prisoners of war and other

rights concerning non combatants as well,

which stemmed right the way back to the Geneva Convention

of eighteen sixty four,

the forerunner of today's modern laws were codified in

the Geneva's conventions.

This created a category of individuals that should be

protected and was the forerunner of what now

understand to be international

human rights law.

The main aspect of what we now reconsider international human

rights law which exists outside of war

even in peacetime,

which is the ability of an international treaty to compel

a country to alter its laws or practices

in order to protect the rights of individuals and be subject

to ongoing scrutiny about the protection of those rights.

Really came into existence after the first world war.

At the end of that war, the peace settlement

was designed to reshape Europe away from a situation

where there were four huge land empires in Germany and

Austro Hungary and recognize

that there were individual countries that had what was

called the right to self determination.

And that could exercise their principles as individual states.

But it was necessary to guarantee in some of these new

countries the linguistics and cultural rights of minorities

that were living there.

And it was also necessary to constantly monitor in an

ongoing process the execution

of those rights.

This is probably the first example of what we would will

now understand what we'll see subsequently later on in this lecture series.

Of what we can of what can be called international human

rights law or a system of international human rights law.

In that there was a clear subject living in a nation

state and clear obligations

on that nation state to protect certain rights of those individuals.

Whilst there are many,

many different sources of human rights philosophically,

and many protections

of human rights within national legal systems, so for example, in Britain,

there was a strong common law protection of human rights

going back many centuries in the United States there were

rights contained in the bill of rights attached to the constitution.

Similarly, in France as well,

there was a tradition of the protection of human rights.

This was about the protection in the domestic sphere.

In international human rights law,

where there is an international treaty or a practice of

customary law protecting an individual. We are looking at

the creation of a legally binding obligation on a country

to change its laws to protect an individual living inside

that country.

And the origins of this really began as we just can

summarize at the about a hundred years ago just shortly

after World War one.