I'm not sure that there exists this set of natural rights that Enlightenment philosophers claimed to have found existing prior to our "discovering" them, though it could be I'm misunderstanding their arguments. This is because human rights tend to be guaranteed only when there is a state that is strong and stable enough to guarantee them. Hannah Arendt noted in her discussions on imperialism that as the nation state system broke down on the eve of World War I (bah or was it after?), the unclassified masses, or ethnic groups that failed to be absorbed in a national government were treated worse than nationalized criminals.
It seems the concept of human rights grew out of this modern emergence of mass human comfort and freedom, which was simultaneously tramped on by absolutist monarchies in the 17th and 18th centuries. The concept of rights emerged out of the need to address recurring abuse.
So a declaration of a right is this sort of expression of an informal socio-political economy. A right says: well you just crushed me, so you owe me a debt. You are going to promise me the right not to be crushed in the future, and since you screwed up so bad, you're going to guarantee that to everyone else too.
So we have another lesson: if you crush a person and they survive, they're going to come back with demands that compensate doubly for the original injury, as they should. You can't break a man's legs and then say: OK I won't do it again. You have to fix him. And of course promise him that it won't happen again, and maybe his friends if he's socially-minded. Or he'll seek to break YOUR legs, or at least avoid you in the future. That's a simplistic picture of how human morality works. Simplistic, but probably true generally.
