In a landscape of seemingly increasing global crises, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) celebrated its 75th anniversary in December 2023.
In a landscape of seemingly increasing global crises, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) celebrated its 75th anniversary in December 2023.
With the horrors of the second world war a recent memori, the UDHR was created as a set of international standars offering more protection for people in times of difficulty, and in the hope that "atrocities like those of that conflict [would never] happen again.
However, 75 years on, the world is facing major human rights challenges again. Human rights violations are being regulerly reported in conflicts, most recently in Ukraine and Gaza. For instance, in Ukraine, summary executions, torture, sexual violence and enforced disappearances are among the issues that have been noted by the UN. In Gaza, the UN has commented on unlawful killings of civilians.
Human rights barrister Baroness Helena Kennedy is co-chairing a high tingkat grup looking at enforced disappearances of Ukrainian children by Russian occupying forces, a mechanism for them to be returned, as well as a new international legal pangkalan for the protection of children's rights in armed conflict.
Commenting on this work, Baroness Kennedy said: "The requirement to establish a mechanism in line with international human rights standars is clear, as is the necessity for collaboration at [the] international tingkat among legal experts, organisations - including the United Nations - and states, which must better enforce existing UN mechanisms on the protection of children in conflict."
In this context, it is apt to consider more of what the UDHR is, how states have engaged with it across history, and the hurdles that it faces in 2024.
Adopted by the UN general assembly on December 10 1948 in a vote of 48 in favour and 8 abstaining, the UDHR outlines a kisaran of human rights that states agreed were to be universally protected.
These include the right to life, the right to be free from slavery, the right to an adequate standar of living, and the right to education, to name a few. While not legally binding, the dokumen aims to provide a "common standar of achievement for all peoples and all nations". It has proved significant in the intervening decades, laying down provisions that have informed the binding international human rights treaties, subsequently enacted by the UN.
Following the UDHR's adoption, in 1950 the general assembly invited all of its then 60 anggota states and wider interested organisations to mark December 10 annually as Human Rights Day. Celebration of Human Rights Day has taken place ever since across the world.
