They dealt with religious freedom as well as civil and...

They dealt with religious freedom as well as civil and political rights and heard petitions by individuals and groups for international protection of those rights. Likewise, major powers agreed in principle to abolish slavery and the slave trade. At Brussels Conference of 1890, a comprehensive treaty for abolishing the slave trade was finally concluded.

Despite the occasional actions, such as the above-mentioned examples, by the individuals, and not by the nationals of protesting states, the issue of human rights appeared on international political agenda during the past three centuries, at least not before World War II broke out. It was because human rights, which as a rule implied the way a state treated its citizens in its own territory, were viewed as an entirely domestic political affair.

And the states were obligated by the principle of non-intervention, as a subsidiary duty of the right of sovereignty, not to interfere in the affairs that were basically within the domestic jurisdiction of sovereign states. However, a state generally tended to the granting of civilized treatment to its citizens. This practice eventually led to the development of what is generally described as treatment in accordance with the minimum standard of international law.

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, a few general treaties have been concluded with the effect to stamp out the gross violations of human rights such as the slave trade. Although it may appear that anti-slavery and humanitarian movements have sought only sets of freedoms and rights of limited groups, they actually have operated upon philosophical foundations closely connected with the entire human kind.

Sympathy for religious minorities and humanitarian ideals helped further expand the international protection of the rights of citizens, by way of treaty and on occasions, by direct intervention. Furthermore, the nationality principle received recognition in the international protection of minorities. During the Second World War, the Allied Powers found in the principle of national self-determination a powerful weapon in their way against the axis powers.