Encyclopædia Britannica: Human Rights - The University of Iowa Center for Human Rights.

"The expression "human rights" is relatively new, having come into everyday parlance only since World War II, the founding of the United Nation in 1945, and the adoption by the UN General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. It replaced the phrase "natural rights," which fell into disfavour in part because the concept of natural law (to which it was intimately linked) had become a matter of great controversy; and it replaced as well the later phrase "the rights of Man," which was not universally understood to include the rights of women."