I'm just beginning law school and this question recently occurred to me. Was the term "human rights" novel at the time of the UN Declaration in 1948? From where did the idea originate that all humans have a set of inherent rights that could and should be codified?
The French Revolution gave us the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1793, so the concept of human rights certainly wasn't novel one hundred fifty years later in 1948. And a few years earlier than that, the U.S. Declaration of Independence stated that, "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights". This rhetoric in both the American and French Revolutions was influenced by the works of Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Voltaire. I don't know if the concept of human rights started with them, but it goes back at least that far.