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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was established in 1948 by the United Nations.

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This means that all the countries in the world accepted to write on a paper which are our basic fundamental rights.

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How many rights have we got?

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In the Universal Declaration there are 30 rights and if you are interested in getting to know them

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I invite you to go to the internet and visit a wonderful website called Youth for Human Rights

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or in Spanish Juventud por los Derechos Humanos

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in which you will find 30 wonderful videos explaining all of your individual rights.

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Now, human rights have very special characteristics that you should know.

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They are universal, imprescriptible and inalienable.

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They are universal because they apply to everybody regardless of our differences.

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They are imprescriptible because they never expire no matter how old you are or what you do.

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And they are inalienable because nobody can take them away from you or ignore you.

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And because you cannot give them away.

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You cannot say you don't want your rights because they intrinsically belong to you.

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Now, why do we have rights?

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That is a difficult philosophical question about the foundations of rights.

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There are different theories to explain this.

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One of them is the conventionalist theory.

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According to conventionalists we have rights because we decided to do that.

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This means that rights come from an agreement.

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So, when people decided to write our articles in a paper, that's why we have rights.

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It's sort of a pact or an agreement made by people.

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This is, for example, the theory that sophists defended.

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They, as you know, were also relativists.

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They thought different countries and different times have different norms and rules.

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So, human rights for them would be only the result of an agreement.

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This means that if we have the way to find a different agreement, our rights could change.

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According to the conventionalist theory, we could change our rights if we agree to modify them in the future.

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Now, there is a different theory, an opposed interpretation of human rights,

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which is called the theory of natural law.

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According to the natural law theory, rights are in our human nature.

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It means that they belong to everybody, everywhere, no matter where or when you live.

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So, human rights are natural.

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They are part of our way of being.

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They form our human essence and we cannot change them because they are in the nature of things.

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John Locke, for example, who was a philosopher who lived in the 17th century, defended the theory of natural law.

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For him, the right to freedom, life and private property are basic rights that belong to us by nature.

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There is a very important thing that you should know about human rights.

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They are not all equal.

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They can be classified.

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Actually, they can be classified in two different ways.

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So, we'll go step by step.

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The first classification of human rights divides them according to which value they are trying to protect.

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Civil rights protect our freedom.

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Civil rights are the things that nobody can do to you because if they do that to you, you are not free.

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No one can do these things, not even the government, not even the state, not even the police.

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Some basic civil rights are the right to life, meaning that nobody can kill you,

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the right not to be tortured or not to be sent to prison without a fair reason,

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the right to a fair trial, the right not to be tortured,

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the right to free expression or to free thought.

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A second group of rights is the political rights.

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Political rights protect our participation in society.

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For example, voting, the right to vote or the right to participate in a demonstration in a public assembly are examples of political rights.

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The third type of rights are social and economic rights.

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Social and economic rights protect our equality because these are things that the state must give you for free.

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For example, education or health protection or social security, including help for unemployed people that lost their jobs.

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All these things must be given to the people by the government for free because if not, we are not equal.

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Think what would happen if you had to pay in order to go to school.

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Only rich people would have the opportunity to have an education and that would break equality in society.

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And the fourth and last group of rights is the solidarity group.

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Solidarity rights are collective rights that apply to peoples, not to individuals.

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And one of them, for example, is the right to live in a peaceful world.

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The right to improve the situation of poor countries, the right to development so that all societies in the world can share a common welfare.

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But as I told you before, there is another way to classify human rights according to when they were established and acknowledged by the legislation.

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According to this classification, human rights are divided in generations.

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The first generation of human rights, which includes civil and political rights, are the first rights that were included in the law.

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These rights were approved in the 18th century after the American and French revolutions.

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You know, the revolutionaries decided that people had to stop being subjects and they had to begin being citizens.

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This meant that there was the necessity to establish limits to what the government could do to people, those are civil rights,

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and that we should grant everybody's participation in society and those are political rights.

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The second generation was established in the 19th and 20th century and it includes social and economic rights.

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It took time to pass these rights in the legislation because, as you know, these rights imply money.

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The government has to pay to ensure that everybody has a free education or free health protection.

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So it was hard to force the government to pass these rights.

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The third generation of human rights includes solidarity rights, like the right to peace or the right to development of poor countries.

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And they were only approved at the end of the 20th century.

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Now, you might think if there are more rights than these 30 human rights included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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Well, some people think there are and, for example, they are planning to develop a fourth generation of human rights,

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including new things such as, for example, the right to access the Internet, which is basic in a modern world like our current world.