• FREEMAN, Michael (2017). Human Rights. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 15–37 and 63–89. (50 pages)

Following questions can structure your reading of both chapters.

After studying them, you will know answers to questions such as:

• When does according to different views history of human rights start and why do they differ?
• How do historical conceptions of rights differ from modern accounts of human rights?
• Was Magna Carta a human-rights document? Why yes/no?
• What did Grotius, Hobbes and Locke thought about natural rights? How they differed?
• Name important HR documents from 17th and 18th century (Great Britain, the US, France).
• Whose philosophy directly influenced US founding fathers?
• What is the core of the Thomas Paine famous conception of the rights of man?
• Who criticized the concept of natural rights and on what grounds?
• What did utilitarians think of  the concept of natural rights?
• Which issues were developed in 19th century as a part of fight for more just world?
• How the concept developed in practice in the first half of 20th century?
• Why is it important to have a theory of human rights?
• On what grounds were existing justifications of human rights criticized after the WW2 at the UN/UNESCO/academia?
• What is the difference between human rights, legal rights and civil rights?
• What are three distinctive characteristics of human rights? (M. Freeman posits that there is a consensus on these three characteristics.)
• What the most common current justifications of human rights?
• What is the relationship between human rights and democracy? And to other values, such as e.g. justice?
• What is the relationship between human rights and obligations?
• Which obligations do we recognize in relation to human rights?
• Which conflicts between human rights can arise and how to resolve them?
• What is the basis of communitarian critique of rights?