The purpose of this research is to examine the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in comparison to the British Bill of Rights, the French Bill of Rights, and the U.S. Bill of Rights. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical context in which these various declarations of human rights emerged, and then to discuss the ways in which the philosophical trends that helped to create the Universal Declaration of Human Rights emerged.
The chronology of these bills of rights and the historical frame in which they developed are easily identified. The British Bill of Rights was established in 1689, as a fundamental part of the so called Glorious Revolution in England. The American and French Bills of Rights emerged next, and chronologically quite close to each other. The French Bill of Rights, which is also known as the Declaration of the Rights of Man, was promulgated in August 1789, following by only a few months the March 1789 ratification of the U.S. Constitution, but preceding by more than two years the ultimate November 1791 ratification of the U.S. Bill of Rights; the amendments that became the Bill of Rights were, however, before the Congress and the first thirteen states in early 1789. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was established by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948, in the early years of the U.N. and in the wake of World War II.
What all the bills of rights cited here share is a climate of assertion of options against the prevailing and unacceptable form of government. Each document emerged out of a period of protracted political and social conflict, and each appears to have been designed to right, in one way or another, the wrongs of the age just preceding. The English Bill of Rights came out of a political conflict with a religious base, at a time when Britain's Parliament and population as a whole were Protestant but its royalty vacillated between Protestantism and Catholicis...