SCOPE OF THE DEFENSE OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN FRANCISCO DE VITORIA

Francisco de Vitoria has been considered one of the first, if not the first, authors treating on human rights, which he considers to be natural rights. However, it has not been studied the scope of his defense of human rights, which is much more limited than what would be expected in a theorist of human rights, because in his work on the law of war he introduces exceptions to the exercise of some rights, like that of personal liberty and private property, that we today would consider unacceptable. In this paper we ex-pose which are the human rights defended by Vitoria, and the scope of such defense, concluding that he only defends one right as absolute: the right to life.