Human rights education is the type of education that should be provided to individuals beginning from very young ages since, with such early human rights education, attitudes and behaviors of individuals toward human rights will be permanent. Social studies classes are the ones that include human rights education in the first place on elementary school level. Social studies class is aimed to raise students as participatory and active citizens who have adopted the democratic values and the respect for human rights. Therefore, pre-service social studies teachers to teach this class in future should have positive attitudes towards human rights education. The purpose of this study was to investigate the attitudes of social studies candidate teachers toward human rights education on different variables. This study is a descriptive research with survey model. “The Human Rights Education Attitude Scale” developed by Karaman-Kepenekçi (1999) was applied to 866 pre-service social studies teachers -1st to 4th years studying at Faculty of Education in six different universities throughout Turkey during 2010-2011 academic year. This study showed that female preservice teachers had more favorable attitudes towards human rights education than male pre-service teachers; those pre-service teachers who willingly and lovingly picked teaching as their profession approached human rights education more favorably than those who did not; and those pre-service teachers who discuss human rights-related topics with their friends, family, and faculty members had more positive attitudes towards human rights education than those who do not. In addition, pre-service social studies teachers have been found to maintain high levels of attitudes towards human rights education