The era of US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair will be remembered for one thing 20 years hence - that the world went backwards on human rights after 50 years of steady advance. Yet, in only a few years, momentum will be restored. The foundations for pushing the frontiers of human rights are well laid and we will regard this political era as more of a setback than a rout. Many scholars have argued that a doctrine of natural rights was implicit in Judeo-Christian teaching. But Moses' law was commandment; so were Jesus' and the Prophet Mohammed's. Natural rights theories are essentially a western invention, dating from around the 12th century. European civilisation was marked, like no other culture, with a new emphasis on humanism. English philosopher William of Ockham took this a step further in the 14th century. Natural rights and natural law, he wrote, were derived from human rationality and free will, and were independent of Christian revelation. Pope Benedict is today an enthusiast of natural law. The Enlightenment was the next great watershed - led by Jean-Jacques Rousseau ('Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains') and Voltaire ('I know of many books that fatigue but not one that has done real evil'). In France, these ideas fuelled the agitation against the Ancien Regime. In the American colonies, they inspired the defiance of the British. It was the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 that first synthesised the best ideas of the Enlightenment. But two years later, the Enlightenment started to run out of breath. Human rights went out of fashion, and even the carnage of the first world war did not bring them back. Neither did Stalin's show trials and mass executions, nor the persecution of Jews in Germany. The dam of apathy was not breached until shortly after the onset of the second world war, when science fiction writer H.G. Wells and a few socialist friends - including Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne - published a declaration of principles on human rights. Penguin Books quickly published H.G. Wells on the Rights of Man. US president Franklin Roosevelt was one of its readers. On January 1, 1942, just after the US entered the war, the Allies said that 'complete victory over the enemies is essential ... to preserve human rights and justice'. From Eleanor Roosevelt's chairing of the UN committee that wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, the founding of Amnesty International, president Jimmy Carter's decision to make human rights a cornerstone of US foreign policy, and on to the setting up of an International Criminal Court, the world has nailed its colours to the mast of human rights. It will take more than eight years of Mr Bush and 10 years of Mr Blair to reverse this advancing tide. As we prepare for a changing of the guard, we must push their successors to take civilisation to a new level - ensuring that tyranny is kept in check, liberty and justice prevail, and that the strong do not trample on the weak and vulnerable. Jonathan Power is a London-based journalist
