Historically, the concept of human rights has existed in European thought for many centuries dating back to the time of King John of England around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, under a number names. After the king violated several ancient laws and customs by which England had been governed, his subjects forced him to sign the Magna Carta (or Great Charter) that lists a number of what later came to be known as human rights. Among these rights were the rights of all free citizens to own and inherit property and be free from excessive taxes, establishing the right of widows who owned property to choose not to remarry,

Later in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, the concept of “natural rights” was proposed by several philosophers who defined it as “the rights belonging to a person by nature and because he was a human being, not by virtue of his citizenship in a particular country or membership in a particular religious or ethnic group.” This concept was viewed by some as a formulation of the underlying principle on which all ideas, political and religious liberty of citizens; but it was vigorously rejected by some other philosophers as baseless. The term “natural rights” eventually fell into disfavor. However, the concept of universal rights took root with the expansion of this idea by philosophers such as Thomas Paine, Henry David Thoreau, and John Stuart Mill. (“A Short, 2) In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, activism of human rights remained in great part tied to religious and political groups. Many revolutionaries made note of the atrocities of governments as evidence that their ideology was necessary to bring an end to the government’s abuses. Examples of later social changes of civil rights include labor unions that introduced laws granting workers the right to strike, forbidding or regulating child labor, gaining the right to vote for many women, and national liberation movements that drove out colonial powers.

One of the most recent successes of this campaign took place was in July, 2003 when Amnesty international issued another “Urgent Action” on behave of several women, men, and children who were arrested in Burundi. Local human rights groups reported soon after the “Urgent Action” was issued that the scale of international pressure helped stop the torture of some of these people, and it even led to the release of others. (“Current”).

Like many other movements, Amnesty International gained its structure by mostly learning by mistakes. Early staff members of Amnesty International operated with no oversight and money was wasted, which led to the establishing of strict financial accountability. Volunteers and staff members of Amnesty International also got involved in partisan politics while working on human rights violations in their own countries, which led to the principle that AI members were not asked or permitted to work on cases in their own country as a matter of practice. Early campaigns of Amnesty failed because the organization was misinformed about certain prisoners, and this led to the establishment of

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