ABSTRACT
Introduction Several European philosophers and political savants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries developed the concept of natural rights; that people possess certain rights by virtue of being human. The revolutions that took place in the United States and France in the eighteenth century produced the American Declaration of Independence, which notably asserted that ‘all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights’, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen defined a set of individual and collective rights held to be universal. The term ‘human rights’ probably became a phrase of accepted usage between the years and works of Tom Paine and Henry David Thoreau.
