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TheNatural law it is the ethical and legal doctrine that sustains the existence of certain rights inherent to the human condition, that is, that they are born together with man and are prior, superior and independent of the positive law (written) and customary law (custom).
This set of norms gave rise to a set of schools and thinkers who responded to the name of the natural law or natural justice, and that he sustained his thinking on the following premises:
- There is a supralegal framework of natural principles regarding good and evil.
- Man is capable of knowing these principles through reason.
- All rights are based on morality.
- Any positive legal system that fails to collect and sanction these principles, cannot be considered in effect a legal framework.
This means that there are primary, natural moral principles that occupy an indispensable place as the basis of any human legal structure. According to this, a law that contradicts said moral principles will not be able to be followed and, moreover, will invalidate any legal framework that supports it, in what was called the Radbruch formula: "extremely unjust law is not true law."
Thus, natural law does not need to be written (like positive law), but is inherent to the human condition, without distinction of race, religion, nationality, sex or social condition. Natural law is supposed to serve as an interpretative basis for the other branches of law, since they are principles of a legal and legal nature, not merely moral, cultural or religious.
The first modern formulations of this idea come from the School of Salamanca and were later taken up and reformulated by the social contract theorists: Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.
However, already in antiquity there were numerous antecedents of natural law, generally inspired by divine will, or attributed to some supernatural character.
Examples of natural law
The divine laws of old. In ancient cultures, there was a set of divine laws that governed men, and whose unquestionable existence was prior to any type of legal order or even the provisions of the hierarchs. For example, it was said in Ancient Greece that Zeus protected the messengers and therefore they should not be held responsible for the good or bad news they brought..
Plato's fundamental rights. Both Plato and Aristotle, eminent ancient Greek philosophers, believed and postulated the existence of three fundamental rights that were intrinsic to man: the right to life, the right to liberty and the right to think. This does not mean that in ancient Greece there was no murder, slavery or censorship, but it does mean that ancient thinkers saw the need for laws prior to any human collective convention.
The ten Christian commandments. Similar to the previous case, these ten commandments supposedly dictated by God became the basis of a legal code for the Hebrew people of the Christian era, and then the foundation of an important tradition of Western thought as a result of the Christian Middle Ages and theocracy. that prevailed in the Europe of the time. Sins (violations of the code) were severely punished by representatives of the Catholic Church (such as the Holy Inquisition).
The universal rights of man. Promulgated for the first time during the early days of the French Revolution, in the midst of the emergence of a new Republic free from absolutist monarchical despotism, these rights were the basis for contemporary formulations (Human Rights) and They contemplated equality, fraternity and freedom as inalienable conditions of all men in the world, without distinction of their origin, social condition, religion or political thought.
Contemporary human rights. The inalienable human rights of contemporaneity are an example of natural law, since they are born together with man and are common to all human beings, such as the right to life or identity, to cite an example. These rights cannot be repealed or revoked by any court in the world and are above any law of any country, and their violation is punished internationally at any time, as they are considered crimes that never prescribe.
