Human Rights

Abstract

In order to understand how Human Rights impact policing, it is critical to have an understanding of the history of Human Rights. The two main categories of religion (Abrahamic and Dharmic) comprise approximately eighty percent of the population of the world. Both of these religions, including their subgroups, have laid out some of the rights and responsibilities of their followers in addition to ensuring that individual and collective rights are protected to some degree. The first primary non-religious documentation of the rights of individuals and groups was in 1215 AD with the creation of the Magna Carta. This document has set the foundation for many other Human Rights decisions or documents over the ensuing centuries, including: the guarantee of a jury trial by Parliament (fourteenth century), a seventeenth century interpretation in England of individual liberties, the United States Bill of Rights (1791), Sir Edward Coke interpreted it as a declaration of individual liberty in his conflict with the early Stuart kings in the 17th Century; and it has echoes in the American Bill of Rights (1791) and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Human rights in both the Canadian and the United Kingdom context, and in relation to policing, are examined. Finally, a case study on a police shooting in Toronto, Canada is studied in detail.