preview

What Is Hammurabi Code Of Human Rights

Good Essays

During the Age of Enlightenment, influential English philosopher John Locke would write that all men had the right to life, liberty and property. These ideas illustrated a major attempt at reform for the issues of human rights. Likewise, throughout the course of history humanity has faced countless conflicts over the impending question, “What rights are humans obliged to?” Many civilizations throughout the course of history have had many diverse answers to this question. Seemingly, historic civilizations have had a variety of rights that were given to the people. The answer to the question is by no means an easy solution to come to. Thousands of years of reform after reform in the past have achieved many tasks for the creation of better …show more content…

Treatment of criminals is also a constant question of the past that societies have had to develop policies to deal with. Societies as early as Mesopotamia discussed this controversy as evident by Hammurabi’s code, one of the first written codes of law. This code outlined how the immoral should be punished yet it is still a debatable source of human’s rights violations throughout history because of its prejudice against lower classes favoring the upper classes. Human’s rights have played a momentous role in history and the ideas of the rights of individuals seem to be a controversy constantly being predicaments in historical societies. Issues in human rights involving the rights of workers have been a major controversy throughout history. For example, major debates in Zimbabwe are currently occurring over the use of child labor in the nation’s gold mines. The mines, according to an account from Zimbabwe written from the perspective of a United Nation’s journalist, are precarious and employ the labor of young boys due to the lack of laws in the country prohibiting child labor. One boy, Tinashe Mugwira, 15, was interviewed, about his work in the mines. He stated that when his father fell ill, he was forced to go out and find work in order to support his family. Although the children are treated the same as the adult workers, the children mine with no formal contracts, protective

Get Access