The Declaration of Human Rights: the Greatest Document

The fortress of the Bastille and its capture, the famous revolutionary song "Marseillaise", the instrument of death and furniture of the guillotine justice, the Jacobin club, terror, political repression - this often comes to mind when it comes to the Great French Revolution. But the events of that stormy era are by no means reduced to bloody episodes alone and to an endless series of internal and external wars. Otherwise, what is the greatness of this revolution? And it is that for the first time in history, an attempt was made to put into practice ideas that had been considered utopian for centuries. In the most concise form, the essence of these ideas is formulated in the immortal motto of the revolution "equality, brotherhood and freedom", and in a more detailed form they have forever entered the world history in a document such as the Declaration of Human Rights.

During the Great Revolution in France several documents with a similar title were published. For example, the first of these is the Declaration of the Rights of Man and a Citizen of 1789, adopted by the Constituent Assembly (the so-called revolutionary parliament), article No. 1 proclaimed that people are free from birth and have equal rights.

The second article talked about the preservation of natural human rights as the main goal of any political union, and the essence of the rights were freedom, ownership, absence of danger to life and the possibility of resistance to oppression.

Then it was said that today it looks absolutely natural, but then it seemed truly revolutionary - about the equality of all, without regard to class membership, before the law, on the freedom of the individual, freedom of conscience, speech and the press. Economic and financial mechanisms were not bypassed - the declaration of human rights declared property "an indestructible and sacred right", and also established a uniform distribution of tax payments among all citizens, the procedure for their collection and supervision of use. A number of articles proclaimed many new, much more progressive legal norms - on the observance of the rule of law, on the procedure for judicial proceedings, and so on. The provisions of the 15th article on the right of citizens to demand a report from each official are relevant today.

Of course, proclaimed literally in the first weeks of the revolution, the Declaration of Human Rights had a number of significant shortcomings. They have to some extent been eliminated in its subsequent edition. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1793 was supplemented by a number of social freedoms: the right to petitions, meetings and even to resistance of the authorities in case of violation of the legitimate interests of the people. The duty of the society to take care of the poor and disabled citizens was emphasized, and it was also said about the promotion of the education of the widest layers of the population.

Since the creation of these historical documents more than two centuries have passed, but even now the Declaration of Human Rights remains one of the most remarkable and most important creations of human thought, regulating the rights and duties of all members of a truly democratic society.