Declaration of human rights: the greatest document

The fortress of Bastille and its capture, the famousthe revolutionary song "Marseillaise", the instrument of death and the 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 turbulent era are by no means reducible toonly bloody episodes and 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 in practice to translate into reality ideas that had been considered utopian for centuries. In the most concise form, the essence of these ideasis formulated in the immortal motto of the revolution "equality, brotherhood and freedom," and in a more developed form they have forever entered the world history in a document such as the Declaration of Human Rights.

During the Great Revolution in France, there wasSeveral documents with a similar title have been published. For example, the first of these is the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789, adopted by the Constituent Assembly (the so-called revolutionary parliament), Article 1 proclaimed that people are free from birth and have equal rights.

The second article talked about the preservation ofnatural human rights as the main goal of any political union, and the essence of the rights themselves was freedom, the possession of property, the absence of danger to life and the possibility of resistance to oppression.

Then we talked about what looks like todayabsolutely natural, but then it seemed truly revolutionary - about the equality of all, without regard for class, 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 of 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 firstweeks 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 indigent 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 documentsmore 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.