human rights
Human rights are the basic freedoms and protections that belong to every single person, simply for being human — not granted as a reward, not earned by good behavior, and not handed out only to citizens of the right country. You have them the moment you are born, the same way a newborn already has a name waiting for it. Things like not being tortured, not being enslaved, being able to speak your mind, and being treated as equal before the law all live under this one roof.
The big idea is that some claims are too fundamental to be left to a king's mood or a government's convenience. After the horrors of the Second World War, the world tried to write this down plainly: in 1948 the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a short, powerful list that opens by insisting all people are "born free and equal in dignity and rights." It is the landmark statement everything else points back to.
A common misunderstanding is that rights are gifts from a government — so a government could simply take them back. The whole point runs the other way: human rights are held to exist whether or not any law recognizes them, and a state that violates them is failing a duty, not exercising a choice. Governments don't create these rights; at best, they promise to protect what was already there.
"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." — Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, Article 1.
The phrase "rights of man" runs through the 18th-century revolutions, but the modern term "human rights" took its commanding form after 1945. Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the committee that drafted the 1948 Universal Declaration; it is not itself a binding treaty, yet it became the seed for later binding covenants and the most translated document in the world.