Human rights are the rock from which modern civilization mines its values, its social contracts, and its entire portfolio of identities. Human rights are the very justification for our system of social coexistence and stratification. They are key to understanding humanity’s (mostly unsuccessful) attempts of balancing the logic of solidarity against the logic of economic greed, the logic of universal equality and dignity against the logic of discrimination and political power, and the logic of preserving planet Earth against the logic of exploitation. The idea of rights as inherent to the human being and as the foundation for social contracts is, in historic terms of development of thought, quite recent. Today’s stupendous and still-accelerating development of inalienable human rights can be traced to roots of formulations in the 17th and 18th centuries in England (Bill of Rights of 1689), France during the French Revolution (Declaration of the Rights of
