Yes, it was intended to capture human rights. Before the Bill of Rights was ratified, the most convincing argument against them - to the people of the time - w

Yes, it was intended to capture human rights. Before the Bill of Rights was ratified, the most convincing argument against them - to the people of the time - was the worry that the act of writing down the rights and putting them in the Constitution might give us (in the future) the mistaken impression that they were up for debate, that they were the only human rights, or that they weren't inherent to human nature. From a legal sense, the human rights captured in the Bill of Rights are only enforced in the context of the US government because the constitution only applies to the US government. At the foundation of the country, there were a set of principles that applied across all of society, but the people designing the government were very worried about scope creep.