Review 'Inventing Human Rights'

Title: Inventing Human Rights: A History
Author: Lynn Hunt
Pages: 272
ISBN: 9780393331998

Inventing Human Rights provides a thoroughly comprehensive perspective of the origins and evolution of human rights from the early struggles of freedom from colonial powers to more recent efforts to ban unorthodox interrogation methods. What makes this published work considerably different from other similar writings is that the author, Lynn Hunt, includes a very unique perspective on how 18th and 19th century novels and art had a humanizing effect that forever changed the way punishment and torture were regarded in Europe and America. Lynn Hunt does a great job in chronicling the events leading up to the three fundamental declarations that represent the struggles and accomplishments of the human rights movements – the Declaration of Independence (1776) following Americas War of Independence, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) following the French Revolution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) following the Second World War. And not to be excluded are details represented by the author’s depiction of the struggles for racial, religious, gender and ethnic rights that still persist to this day in many parts of the world. Differentiated from other historical writing is the record of treatment on human rights with very detailed accounts of past judgments from the Calas case (1762) to the Dreyfus case (1894) to the Nuremberg Trials (1945-46). We can only expect another volume will be in the making, by the author, as we are witnessing major events that are forever changing our view of human rights.