This article by the Alex Gladstein, The Chief Strategy Officer for the Human Rights Foundation, is one of the best I have read regarding Human Rights and Bitcoin.
There are so many good quotes in the article but the one I can see myself using a lot is ‘..decentralized money (Bitcoin) could actually improve the world just like decentralized government (democracy) and decentralized knowledge (the Internet).’
I would add that the ideas in the article also apply to general purpose public blockchains.