ABSTRACT
Human rights are understood today to be universal rights, held by every human being, everywhere in the world. The foundational international legal instrument is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Human rights are universal in the sense that they have been accepted by almost all states as establishing obligations that are binding in international law. The striking extent of the formal international legal endorsement of human rights reflects the fact that adherents of most leading comprehensive doctrines across the globe do in fact endorse internationally recognized human rights. The Catholic Counter-Reformation and the intolerance of most ruling Protestant regimes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries suggest that early modern Europe was in many ways a particularly unsupportive cultural milieu for developing human rights ideas.
