The medieval background to human rights is very effectively explored by Roger Ruston in his Human Rights and the Image of God. He focuses on Thomas, Vitoria, Las Casas and Locke. He has pertinent observations to make also on the place of human rights in the churches and especially in the Roman Catholic Church today.

Ruston begins from the traditional suspicion of the Catholic Church towards rights discourse, based on its supposed Enlightenment origins and its stress on individualism and the subsequent transition to a Catholic paradigm of rights, notably in Vatican II's Dignitatis Humanae of 1965. He sees a resistance to this openness in John Paul II's Evangelium Vitae of 1995, with its attack on a ‘culture of death’. ‘This resistance is reflected in the fact that, of the 103 or so international conventions relating to human rights, the Holy See has subscribed to a mere 10’ (Ruston, p. 43). There are problems with an autocratic church government. He notes that human rights within the church itself remain ‘very much at the level of the theoretical’ (p. 51).

St Thomas uses the Imago Dei metaphor extensively to show that human beings, quite distinct from other animals, are made in the image of God and capable of knowledge of God. But slaves remain inferior, for slavery is a punishment for sin. The treatment of slavery remains under the influence of Aristotle's notion that slaves are naturally in servitude. Ruston considers the examples of Vitoria and Las Casas to document their opposition to the exploitation of the native peoples of America in the Spanish conquest. This protest began with a sermon by Fr Antonio Montesino in 1510 which directly invokes Christ in the name of justice.

Vitoria argued that the Indians had their own natural dominium, which should not be violated. Lack of Christian religious belief could be no excuse for war against them. In this tradition Ruston sees a developing argument for objective rights based on equality and justice. He finds in Gerson an argument for individual liberties, without which a community cannot flourish. But the central figure in this tradition is Las Casas, who devoted his life to supporting the Indians against their oppressors.

Here too there is a christological strand combined with arguments from natural law.

But as often, theory of rights was not followed by enforcement of rights. ‘For all the debates and the learned treatises the benefit to the Indians was apparently next to nothing’ (ibid., p. 219).

Ruston sheds light on numerous aspects of the development of rights talk. Renaissance humanists were often more concerned for civil society than untutored nature and untutored barbarians and therefore laid little stress on natural law. Las Casas was generous towards the Indians but harsh towards heretics – then as now respect for difference is usually selective. On the other hand, he could invoke the legal maxim, Quod omnes tangit debet ab omnibus approbari (What touches all should be approved by all), to call for government by consent, which could have potentially enormous consequences for church as well as society (p. 281).

The development of rights is traced further through Grotius, who compares the sovereign individual with the sovereign state, to Locke. There is no inexorable line from Locke to free-market neoliberalism (p. 324). Rights involve duties, coming for Christians from the commandment of Christ (p. 349) and involving human beings as created in the image of God. There are important continuities as well as discontinuities between Locke and the tradition of natural law. Ruston concludes that neither individual rights nor social rights are enough by themselves – both are essential for a just society.

As more work is done on Bartolome Las Casas he begins to emerge as a prophetic figure in the history of rights discussion. Roger Ruston's work should be supplemented by Brian Tierney's meticulous surveys of medieval distinctions in rights theory. But it provides a highly readable and perceptive introduction to issues of continuing contemporary importance.