ABSTRACT
International law from its inception has been concerned with the protection of human beings against acts of barbarism. These considerations can be found in the writing of the fathers of international law: Francisco de Vittoria, Francisco Suarez and Bartholomy de Las Casas. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf and Jean Jacques Burlamagui contributed to the development of the concept of human rights considering them as rights, which are inherent to human beings. This philosophy was reflected in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen 1789, in particular its art 2 which states that:
‘The aim of all political association is the conservation of the natural and inalienable rights of man. These rights are: liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.’
