4. Nature of rights.

From their earliest origins catalogues of rights took the form of aspirational declarations, and the rights were accordingly declared in broad, often absolute, terms¹. However, the legal and political will to advance the protection of fundamental rights at the level of both national and international law in the latter half of the twentieth century resulted in the rise of increasingly sophisticated and much more extensive national Bills or Charters of Rights, and International Human Rights Treaties, which replaced the absolutist, declaratory nature of the statements in the early bills or declarations of rights with the language of balancing