14_conclusions_2.pdf - Chapter – I INTRODUCTION Public...

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Chapter – I
INTRODUCTION
Public Interest Litigation (PIL) is a legal action which is taken in a
court of law for legal right of the community. The phrase “Public Interest
Litigation” refers to particular human claim made in a politically
organized society or political institution. The concept of human rights
has assumed importance globally during the past few decades ever since
the announcement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Human
rights are the important element of philosophical, social and political
debates of the twentieth century. Number of people around the world
suffers from their basic needs. They are also refrained from the
enjoyment of the basic economic, social, cultural, civil as well as political
rights. This challenge is the basic issue not only concern with the one
country but also universal and global.
The idea of the term “human rights” is older and not the invention
of the twentieth century. The genesis of human rights is the utopian
concept of natural rights traceable from the days of the Greek or even
earlier. The period of renaissance witnessed the basic changes in the
belief of society. People thought that an idea of human right is to be a
general, social need and reality. The real foundation of human rights was
truly laid when resistance to religious intolerance and political economic

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bondage began. The Magna Carta (1215), The petition of Rights (1628),
and the English Bill of Right (1689) were proof of the human rights.
The scientific and intellectual achievement of liberal thinkers
Galileo, Newtion, Francis Bacon, John Lock, Montesquieu, Voltair and
Rosseau had a profound influence on the western world of the late 18
th
and early 19
th
centuries. Similarly, the French Declaration of the Rights
of Man (1789), emphasized that “men are born and remain free and equal
in rights” which are “liberty, property, safety, and resistance to
oppression.” It defined “liberty” so as to include the right to religious
freedom, freedom of association, right to free speech, and freedom from
arbitrary arrest and confinement. The most serious philosophical blow to
natural rights theory came particularly under the influence of Edmund
Burke, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, J.S. Mill, Friedrich Karl Von
Savigny, Sir Henry Maine, John Austin and Hegel.
The world community realized for the first time, the need to
establish some institutional mechanism to protect and preserve the rights
of man after the First World War. The idea of human rights came truly
into its own after the rise and fall of Nazism in Germany. The world
institution was established after the First World War. However, after
Second World War in 1945, the important development took place i.e. the
establishment of the League of Nation for the protection of all individuals
against all forms of injustice and human rights violations after the UN

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charter was signed in 1945. The Charter of the United Nations, which
stressed the urgency of international co-operation for human rights, social
Justice, peace and fundamental freedoms.