 In order to understand what we're talking about when we talk about human rights It might be a good idea to just take a quick look at a sort of history and this is just a history quite a European one because a lot of the academic reading that we did for this lesson really kind of concentrated on the European story and there's very little reference to it in other places But in the beginning when we look at human rights on a timeline We start with this period around the creation of a document called the Magna Carta The Magna Carta is often cited or hailed as being this one moment in history where things start off in the direction of human rights and To understand why that is sort of true and sort of not you'll have to understand the idea or sort of the Modus at the time sort of way of thinking at the time which was that freedom came through status and What did status mean? Well status Had to do with whether you had land or not and whether you were royalty or not so when we're talking about the human rights that are being sort of Built up in the Magna Carta. We're talking about The freedoms of a very small group of people this 0.001 percent of people suddenly have this right to Own land and that sort of makes them different from people before them It's a move forward, but it's for a very small group of people Well things move forward in you know particularly in European history where we're sort of looking at the moment We'll look at other places in other lessons and in other courses But then you have a period of sort of overlap with this next period and then you have a long kind of time When you then have this sort of separation forming between status and freedom so a period of time when people are thinking well Just because you have status doesn't necessarily mean that you get all the freedoms and That you have some special rights But you do have to remember that even in this moment. So while this whole thing is happening You still have lots of feudalism Which just means that there are lots of people who have are literally almost owned by Some sort of overlord and then you have people who are living in slavery a large portion of the global population Who really weren't being directly owned not even just indirectly but really being directly owned By some sort of overlord so this period of time although there's a move towards Freedoms and away from status You're still having a lot of bad stuff going on Well towards the end of this period of time. There's a few names who are going to be sort of important to know Starting around the beginning of the 1600s You have this very important British guy named John Locke John Locke comes up with and sort of pulls together a lot of different ideas They're in the air at the time that he's alive and working And he kind of writes down this concept of natural rights These natural rights are life liberty and property So this sort of is a thought that's in the air right now lots of people are thinking about this Couple you know a couple years down the road and really even at the beginning of this you also have this intellectual movement called the enlightenment I'll let you read more about that on your own the enlightenment's a very interesting time and Then you know still sort of right around this time yet again just a few more years down the road You have the English bill of human rights Sorry, not a human rights English bill of rights We hadn't yet come up with the idea of human rights yet At this point. We were just calling them rights So the English bill of rights comes up Which is in part inspired by this sort of idea of natural rights that is forming that John Locke has written about that a lot of other people are talking and writing about as well and All this sort of is triggering what is then sort of the next stage in This development that we're seeing up here at the top Which is a movement towards? Something that we were we can call kind of a period of individual rights and Freedoms and I'm not going to write freedoms because you've seen it a few times but individual rights and freedoms and This is a really important stage because this is when sort of some of this Discoupling this sort of separation of freedom and status becomes individualized and it becomes seen as something for individual members of the society and This is really kind of I think something that you can look at when you when you look at something like the American or French revolutions This is really People on the ground taking a look at Ideas like this that are really in the air these ideas of things like natural rights These are everywhere at the moment that these revolutions happen and you can see people in those societies Taking those ideas and running with them and then later establishing them into constitutions and other things and in fact just a few years down the road in 1789 You see the first usage of the the actual term human rights Being used in France, which is an in a document that is a part of this process So this is really actually very interesting You have this idea that Individuals have rights and freedoms that are not reliant upon their status Everyone is entitled to these rights Most of them having to do with voting and ideas of sort of civic engagement the right to sort of take part in society in a way and This is just a very important moment Well moving on from there become we kind of move into sort of what is really now the modern era Starting in sort of the end of the 1800s You begin having of movement towards social and collective rights and These social and collective rights are also a very important driver behind this sort of more general trend Which is an internationalization and the internationalization of rights Basically just means that these rights are being spread to more places and more corners of the world You can see an example of the internationalization of these rights in something like the nexican constitution Which is often the scene as being a very sort of forward-thinking Constitution which was written in the sort of end of the 1800s early 1900s and Displays a lot of these social and collective rights that are another step beyond Individual rights and freedoms these social and collective rights are things like education employment Welfare and public health. So people are thinking a little bit more deeply about what does it mean to have a right? Well, you move then from that phase to a very important moment in global history Which is World War two and this kind of changes everything because we've got this concept of human rights We have these ideas of social collective rights and rights and freedoms But then we have this terrible terrible war in which a very high percentage of the global population is is really just murdered and From that you have the formation of lots of global organizations and one of the most important ones being the United Nations United Nations is a big global organizations kind of based on the idea of sort of creating a more healthy global community where there's just a little bit more connectivity between each of the different countries and all the different people of the world and From the United Nations, we get things like the United Declaration of Human or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I always forget to say Universal for some reason in this the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and we're going to talk about that in a later lesson but this is a very important document that sort of underlies this course and We'll talk a lot more about the United Nations as well All right, so one last slide Because if you were to take a look at that last slide You might just walk away thinking that human rights in general are always on an upward trend So that if you had 1200 over here 1600 in the middle 2000 here and Let's just imagine that up here. We've got utopia Plus sign up here and down here We've got some other horrible reality that you know Maybe we started out over here and then in general things just slowly get a little bit better over time And that we're working our way towards that utopia that we all hope for But the reality of human rights is that they are not permanent rights are not Permanent and they don't even really grow all that consistently because if you were to kind of Smoosh it all together and sort of imagine that you had one indicator line or one way of tracking human rights It might kind of look something like this The human rights are constantly getting violated and then things are getting better and then getting violated again and getting better and Really you kind of slowly make your way upwards and then you have really big setbacks like right here World War two and then you kind of go back up and It's in these moments like the one that we had when we were murdering millions of people across the world In World War two and even today as there are still lots and lots of human rights violations And we aren't even close to this utopia It's in these moments that we have to really remember that these rights are not permanent and that we all take and play an active role in making them something that move upwards and That this is an important decision that we all make as a society All right, so that is your lesson about the history of human rights There's a lot more coming up here at overseas or You